Articlr

It seems that it has been years since I was a landlord.  I had the opportunity to manage a 50 unit apartment complex for a couple of years, and I learned a lot about property management. 

Some of the biggest lessons I learned dealt with property repair, time management and outsourcing.  At that time in my life, I thought I was superman and could do five million things in one day - which I quickly found out that I just couldn’t.  There was just so much time in a day - and I had to learn how to manage it properly.

Perhaps my biggest problem was doing landlord tenant referencing - checking out the references of a potential tenant.  I found that it took way too long to get in touch with some or any of their references, check the stories that I was told, and decide from there if we wanted them as a tenant or not.

I learned quickly that reference checking didn’t screen out all the bad tenants.  In fact, if the stories seemed too good to be true, then you probably had a bad tenant on your hands.  Too bad there was no way to check tenant risk back in those days - unlike the "perks" landlords enjoy now.

All in all it was a good learning experience that I hope I never have to do again - I would hire a property management company before I would ever be a landlord again.  At least I do have the experience to talk to them and tell them what I need - which is more than I can say for a lot of new property investors.