Have you asked your property management company about the importance of days?

We encourage our clients to understand the long-term benefits of holding their Long Beach rental properties. There is a cost to each day. When you have a property management company it is important to understand how they approach key activities to understand the costs.

Whether you are going to manage your rental yourself, interview a Long Beach Property Management Company, or even call us to manage your property we encourage you to get the answers to the following questions to help you understand the costs of ownership.

As soon as a property is vacant the clock is ticking. Your property goes from an asset (i.e. an object that produces income) to an expense (i.e. an object that costs you money). Whenever a tenant vacates a property there are inevitable items that must be done such as:

• Clean the property
• Identify items that need repair
• Prepare property for the next tenant
• Re-shoot pictures for advertising
• etc.

This list may seem small. We encourage you to ask your potential property management company how long they will take to complete tasks when a tenant vacates a property.  

For example you could simply ask “On average, for a single family home in the Los Altos neighborhood, how long does it take you to get it rental ready?”.  

Regardless of how many days they share, dig deeper to find out what scope of repairs/preparation they handled and even ask “how long was your longest time period before a rental was ready to market?”. These questions aren’t designed as a gotcha, rather they are designed to help you understand the best case and worst case scenario when it comes to a vacant rental property.

You might not think that the days to schedule a repair are that big of a deal but that can entirely depend on the tenant. Repairs are a big deal in California as consider just the basic two items:

• Landlords are required to provide a liveable premises
• Tenants can withhold rent if the property doesn’t meet minimal conditions

While we could go into much greater detail the fundamental truth is repair requests need to be responded to quickly and with a great deal of documentation to avoid potential conflict with your tenant. One person’s “not a big deal” is another person’s “emergency” and trying to understand the difference is futile which behooves you to understand from the property management company what are their time periods of response for a repair to ensure you can simply keep collecting rent.

Once a property has started to be marketed for lease...how long is it before a tenant is occupying the property? Some property managers track their data better than others and if your property management company can’t give you an idea of how long it takes to lease up a property by property type (i.e. duplex, ADU, condo, single family home, etc.) then you might want to consider different alternatives.

If you think you can be flexible on the number of days that a property can sit vacant while being ready for lease consider the following:

• If your mortgage on your rental is $2,800 a month
• On average each day costs you $93+
• If their average lease up period is 20 days, then that cost of that vacancy could be $1,866 to you.

If you find competitors are average 12-15 days then each day is more money in your pocket. The key is to ask the question and even have them provide you with the listings of their last 10-12 leased up properties to allow you to see for yourself the listing to lease up period for yourself.

Finding the right property management company that understands the importance of each day can be a challenge. When you would like to understand more about our timing standards for these situations and more we invite you to call us today at (562) 888-0247 as we’d be happy to help. When you want a quick check to see how much your property could fetch in rent we invite you to fill out our Free Rental Analysis where we perform a comprehensive comparison to share your rental stacks up to the competition.