The rent manager has a very important job to do. He or she can make the difference between a building that is running well with satisfied tenants who take care of their units and those that do not. A rent manager is accountable for quite a few different activities. Although most people would feel that they are the ones who decide who to rent to and collects the rental checks.
Renting to the wrong person can mean that the investor who owns the property ends up with a bad tenant. They damage the unit, do not keep it clean, etc. When they finally move out there is a lot of expense to clean the unit and repair damage. This cannot always be charged back to the tenant because of laws that various governments have put in place to protect tenants. In our experience, there are lots of good people who rent properties. Unfortunately, there are lots that make it bad for everyone and really do not take care of their units.
Rent Manager Responsibilities
The rent manager may advertise for tenants, he or she may screen tenants and make decisions about renting. They recommend that tenants be accepted or rejected from a building. For large buildings, the guidelines are established by the owners and the rent manager must apply those guidelines without too much interpretation. They also need to make sure that all applicable laws for the town or city they are in are followed.
Lease documents must be filled in and signed which for large companies will include auto-payment deductions directly from your bank account. In many situations, 12 post-dated checks will be requested. One for each month, however, this is becoming less and less common as more and more people move to EFT transactions.
The rent manager must also deal with troublesome tenants. Such issues as repairs in tenants’ units. Any problems with the building that may be caused by tenants or maybe causing difficulty for the tenants. In some situations, a rent manager may only focus on the rental of the units, particularly for a large building. In other situations, they may have a wider scope of control and responsibility.
Small Claims Court
Most landlords will take the tenant to small claims court to collect on the damages. Many will skip town that it is sometimes difficult to track them down. Also, rent managers will sometimes end up renting to a bad tenant. This is because they get glowing references from other rent managers who are trying to get rid of a bad tenant. There are also laws that restrict what you can say about customers and clients without the appropriate data to back you up. It seems that governments have gone out of their way to protect tenants and not so much the landlords. There is an image that the big bad landlords will take advantage of the poor tenants.
Of course, there are a lot more votes from tenants than there are landlords and the politicians will always go for the votes. They may not realize that they are creating the perfect conditions for dead beat tenants to take advantage of landlords. There are bad landlords of course, but sometimes the pendulum swings too far. Then no one wants to build rental buildings and they certainly do not want to rent to bad tenants. The cities will invest in subsidized housing. Generally, this has been a disaster with units, not wells maintained and tenants destroying units! It just costs the taxpayer a lot of money to support these people who by the way generally do not pay taxes. They also receive many other benefits such as free health care.
Rent to High Quality Tenants
One of the main jobs of a well-run building for a rental manager is to only allow high-quality people to rent from the owner. This means people who have jobs, who have a track record of paying their bills all of the time. Who do not skip out in the middle of the night? Everyone is happier including the tenants who do not have to deal with transient people coming and going.
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March 6th, 2013 on 2:54 pm
being a rent manager is a tough job. you hear all of these sob stories as to why they cannot pay the rent, when they have a carton of cigarettes and a case of beer sitting in plain site. people can be really difficult to deal with some times