Usually my posts are geared to Landlords and Tenants, however, I’d like to change it up and have a heart-to-heart chat with real estate agents about offering property management services.  Wait a minute… I don’t know why I make such absolute statements like that, my posts are also geared to fashionistas who love shoes and those who have the suga’.  Nonetheless, I digress.

I have been a REALTOR® for 12 years now listing and selling conventional residential properties, in addition to managing rentals here in Springfield, Missouri.  Often my colleagues ask me a question along the lines of “Why in the world do you do that? There is no money in property management.”  I beg to differ as property management has worked very well to my advantage as a REALTOR®.

1. It has been that steady stream of income (the monthly management fees) for when sales have hit a lull and income has not been consistent.
2. I (together with my business partner which is what I mean when I say the word “I”) have built a strong base of repeat investors who have used our real estate services to find and purchase good deals as rental properties.  Usually, they want the good rental investment, but don’t want to deal with management of the Tenants.
3. I have put together an in-house maintenance team, which consists of a mixture of employees and sub-contractors that can do a complete maintenance overhaul on a home that could easily rival that of an Extreme Home Makeover team (okay… almost.) I give my crew a guaranteed 40 hours Monday-Friday and pay them a salary.  Then I bill the hours, and my time to coordinate the crew, to the investor/owner.  This results in receiving income that is nice to have when my real estate commission checks are less frequent.
4. I get a lot of good credit card points for when we purchase supplies for home repairs (that we bill out to our investors/owners).  These points have sent me and the hubs on a cruise or two when I’ve desperately needed a vacation.
5. I create my “farm area” with my 600+ Tenants who eventually turn out to be homebuyers or at least refer me to their contacts who are buying homes.  The trick to this is to let your Tenants know that you are a REALTOR® who is not just managing property, but also selling houses, because they often don’t know how the process works.

So before you start judging me, thinking “I could never do property management” then let me say “yeah, you’re right, you could never do that.” <insert sarcasm here>

Think of me when I’m on my next cruise.

Don’t worry, you didn’t miss “Choose Your Roommates Wisely (Part 1)” – it was written over on Zillow’s blog here.  In a spinoff post from the original that I wrote for Zillow, I have added this second part about choosing your roommate wisely.  Call it a series with sarcasm.

Roommate drama can be the biggest pain in the backside, especially when you’re their landlord/property manager and they drag you into the middle of it.  I certainly get my fair share of it usually around the first week of the month, also known as “rent week.”  Typically it happens when one roommate has paid their portion of the rent and the other has not.  I get a lot of requests from the “good tenant” to contact their “deadbeat roommate” and see when they will pay.  Here’s my answer to that… “um, no.”  Plain and simple.  Because here’s how I see it, and how our office policy goes–

1) I look at the rent payment as a whole.  Although I do mark where each payment came from, in all reality I don’t care who’s paid what and when.  I don’t decide how the tenants are to divide up the rent and who should pay what portions and when.  That’s your deal, not mine. Therefore if the rent is not paid in full, you are all late in my mind.

2) I don’t get involved in domestic disputes.  Whether they are between a boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, or just two people who were considered besties just before they decided to rent a place together.  If your roomie really did steal something from your room, then call the police, not me.  But the domestic disputes do give me good blogging content, so keep ‘em coming.

3) I’m not your Mom.  I have two kids of my own that have their disputes over whose turn it is to play the Xbox 360 that I have to referee.  Most of the time, my kids have three times the maturity that some of my tenants have when it comes to handling their disputes.  I am their Mother, not yours, so you kids go work it out and let Mommy have some alone time! *angry eyes*

4) I don’t get paid enough for this.  Granted, I make a good living at what I do, but I don’t get paid near enough for hearing out Tenant fights.  Therefore, when tenants call wanting me to take so-and-so off the lease agreement or change something in the lease, I say “no problem” and charge them a $150 Lease Change Fee.  Or they have the option of leaving things like they are and working it out.  Like I said, I don’t get paid enough to hear the complaining and try to fix the problems, so I am going to charge you for it. Call your shrink to hear you out about how your roommate is such a loser.  They are probably cheaper than I am.

5) You should’ve chosen your roommates wisely.  Use your head, if there is a chance you won’t get a long with your new BFF, then maybe you should consider keeping them as your bestie and not your roommate.  Find someone you do get along with or find a less expensive place to rent and live alone.  Because maybe, just maybe, you’re the problem– not them.

Just saying. </random rant>

My property management company hires a lot of sub-contractors.  If there is a job that needs to be done outside of general maintenance such as electrical, roofing or HVAC work, then I have to sub-contract it out.  Our in-house maintenance crew is awesome, but sometimes the job is just out of their scope.

However, there are sometimes that the work just doesn’t come out right when using subs.  There is a way to keep your frustrations at bay and that is set forth a policy now.  Our office policy states that paychecks are only available on Fridays after 2:00 pm.  In order to receive the paycheck, the work must be completed and the the invoice turned into the office no later than 5pm on the Wednesday before.  We check/validate the work on Thursdays and then checks are cut.  There are no exceptions and we have this all written out in our guidelines sheet that we give to the sub-contractors when they sign on to work with us.

There is a reason why we check work on Thursdays… is this.  A light switch was installed by the electrician and they cut the drywall hole way too big.  They just left it wide open, didn’t even bother to try to fix it or put the faceplate on it. This kind of stuff frustrates me to no end.  You might be thinking, just cover it up with an oversize switch plate.  Um… hole is still too big.

Uhh... it's a little over cut.

So… needless to say, this electrical sub-contractor didn’t get a paycheck this week.  He was ticked.  But seriously, why should we pay you when the work isn’t done and it isn’t done right? You’ll have to wait until next week, so sorry, I told you we run a tight ship around here.

In my almost 12 years of managing rental property, I’ve had to only have to deal with one major house fire, one molitov cocktail and one almost serious fire just today.  I consider myself fortunate, but my hard work and obsession with checklists is paying off.  More and more of our tenants are taking good care of their properties, keeping their smoke detectors working properly and my staff is doing a good job of keeping periodic inspections on each of our 200+ properties.

But back to the seriousness of today.  My tenant calls in and says “Uhh… yeah I’ve got a little problem.”  Surprisingly, he was very chilled out about this.  Most of my tenants are drama queens and I get such exaggerated stories, but this one was actually pretty even keeled about the whole situation. So I pressed him a little further….

I ask: “Uhh… what kind of problem?” (I find it easy to match his zen like attitude.)

Tenant: “Well, I was in the shower…”

Me thinking, not saying: “Mayday! Mayday! I don’t want to hear about you in the shower!”

Tenant interrupting my thoughts: “…and when I got out, I noticed the side of my house was on fire.”

Me shrieking: “What?! Is everyone and everything okay?!” <—drama queen!

Tenant: “Yeah, it’s all good, the fire department got here pretty quick and got it out.  Everything is fine, except there is a little bit of siding damage.”

Me: “Mmmm…kay, glad to hear you all are safe. I will send my crew out to evaluate the damage and let you know where we will go from here.  I’m assuming that your smoke detectors are all in place and working, right?”

Tenant: “Yes, they are.”

Me thinking, not saying: “Uhh… they better be.”

Me, now saying outloud: “Well thanks for calling and letting me know.”

I breathe a sigh of relief and make myself a cold Diet Coke on the rocks.  You know, because I’m chilled about this kind of stuff. * insert sarcasm here *  Until I saw the pictures that my maintenance crew took…. O.M.G. this could’ve been way worse.

This could've been way worse.

A little more than "just some siding damage."

We’re still determining the cause and I will keep you posted as to how this happened.  However, as with any fire, I take this as a moment to broadcast this important PSA—- please, please remember to check the smoke detectors in your home.  Be sure that they are properly working and that there are fresh batteries in them.  Smoke detectors save lives.  At least they certainly did today.

Let’s just say that blogging on this personal site has been on the back burner for 2011.  But considering that it’s the last day of the year, I might as well post, just so that I can continue to call myself a blogger.  Granted, 19 blog posts in one year hardly qualifies me for “Blogger” status in my opinion, but I’m taking on the fact that I’ve been doing some blogging on other important sites too.

In recap, 2011 had both highs and lows.  And I’m not just talking about my blood sugar levels.

Early 2011 we took a family trip to Disney World and had a magical time and we also took a road trip to see family we have in Pennsylvania.  One of the stops we made was in Hershey, PA where we toured the Hershey Factory and made our own chocolate bars!

Somewhere in the middle of 2011, things got super busy with work (common and typical).  I again served as a Director on the Greater Springfield Board of REALTORS® MLS and in 2012, I will be the 1st Vice President and I’m looking forward to a term as President in 2013.  The Board itself is doing some incredible things with an MLS Regionalization project that I’m very involved in helping with.

The Donald and I, working as a team, have continued to sell a lot of real estate, rent a lot of property and we spoke at the National Association of REALTORS® Annual Conference for the third year in a row!  It was an exciting time in Anaheim, California.

I am very excited about what 2012 holds for my career with my work with the local, state and national Associations of REALTORS®. I am serving on quite a few state and national committees, including vice-chairing the NAR Property Management Forum!

In addition to continuing to write continuing education courses for REALTORS®, we also worked on a bigger web project called Landlord Red List.  The site is designed to assist Landlords from across the country in how to process rental applications that they receive from potential tenants.  The project has currently been put on hold as we are looking at some re-design and hope to launch it soon.

At the end of the year, my office moved into bigger and nicer digz.  Since I’m still in the process of getting things settled and hanging pictures on the wall, I will have to post more pictures and invite you to our Open House soon.  It’s an incredible building and we’re excited about the growth of Dizmang Properties.  The new place has beautiful office space, including classroom space for us to teach real estate classes.  There is also a large warehouse space in the back that will allow us to efficiently run our property management maintenance out of.  It’s nice to ditch the 3 or 4 storage units we have had and have all the supplies and crews under one roof.  However, watching them take down my old office was really a reflective moment for me.  I had spent 11 years in that office and have accomplished A LOT.

JDRF has of course made some big changes including a new logo in 2011.  It thrills me that they are somewhat re-branding themselves to be the ultimate leader for finding the cure for type 1 diabetes for BOTH children and adults.  (See the “T1D” within the logo between the “J” and “D”?)  They have seen that there are many adults that have type 1 and it’s not just the children that we are finding this cure for.  Locally here, JDRF Ozarks held their 2nd annual Jingle Bell Bash in December and it raised $78,000 for type 1 diabetes research!  Who would’ve thought that the our local chapter would have come so far, so quickly?

Thankfully, the hubs still has a cush job with AT&T and he really is my ultimate support to get the things done that I need to get done every day.  He also leaves me sweet notes in the garage each week so that I see them as I’m coming and going out.  Yeah, it’s the little things that keep me going.  We celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary in October and had a good time gambling it up at Downstream Casino.  Ahhh, the crazy things we do!

And today my sweet baby youngest child, Collin, turns 8 today on New Years Eve.  He and his brother, Jake, and their Dad sure make my world go ’round.

I didn’t mail out Christmas cards this year, so if you’re a close friend/family member reading this post, don’t be offended. I still have a passion for shoes, I have loved watching my niece and nephew grow up and having them live so close…  Sheesh! 2011 has been a wild ride.  Clearly you can see that I’ve been pretty busy, hence the slow blog posting.  I will make an effort to keep things fresh in 2012.  Don’t call it a resolution, call it a comeback.

Happy New Year y’all!

I’ve had some projects bouncing around for awhile now and one of them is finally getting all of the loose ends tied down as I mentioned in my previous post.  It’s landlordredlist.com.  Ironically, the “red” part of it has nothing to do with my red soled shoe obsession.  The red-listing had started a long time ago, in fact it was documented on this blog back in May of 2008. We put the plans in place and finally created the company LLC, secured the domain, writing the frameworks and developing the marketing plan.  And now it’s come to fruition and will launch in just a few short weeks.

Working in my property management day job, we have had a rash of obvious, fake landlord references come through on our rental applications.  What are these people thinking?! Do they really think that we won’t notice?  *Ahem* This is not our first rodeo, we do A LOT of property management here in Springfield, Missouri.  We have our “ways” of checking out potential tenants, but it tedious trying to go to all the sources to research someone.  It would be nice to have one centralized place to go 24 hours a day where I can check out an applicant.  So imagine a combination of the courts Case Net, The Better Business Bureau, Rate-A-Realtor, and Angie’s List all in one place and you’ll have Landlord Red List.

It’s a pet project that will take some time to build up the database, but my business partners and I are working our little fingers to the bone.

I know, I know… another project… shocking, huh?  As usual, thanks for hearing me out.

I am embracing some new things/changes with my daily grind.  Not sure what all it entails yet, but I need to tie up some loose ends on outstanding projects and really make a break on some new ones that are brewing in my head.  It’s a stretch-and-grow thing for me as there may be a shift in the company direction of the day job.  (It’s all good things, I promise!)  Nonetheless, I need to get my feet wet in some areas that I’m not quite used to, in regards to real estate brokerage projects.

I’m pulling it all together by taking a break from the business planning and taking a much-needed vacation road trip with the hubs and Thing 1 and Thing 2 this week.  What better time to bond than over an 18-hour road trip to Canton, Pennsylvania?  (Small town just on the NY/PA state line where the hubs is from… so we’re visiting family.) On the journey, I start in on a deep conversation with the hubs talking about the new direction I’m looking at taking and how I need to really get my feet wet in some new areas of my business.  All of the sudden I feel a splash of cold water on my feet in the car.  It freaks me out and I shriek like a little girl!  (Not to worry, it’s just a drip from the A/C condensation line in the car.  Good grief it’s 110 degrees outside, cut it some slack.)

I will take it as a sign to move forward… I don’t mean to be cryptic, I promise I will keep you posted.

I’m so excited! The National Association of REALTORS® has selected me (and The Donald) to speak at their annual conference and expo again in 2011!

This is the third year in a row that we will speak on Property Management and Residential Real Estate Investments at the conference. The first year 2009, in San Diego, I thought, went seamless and perfect. I was nervous as all get out, but it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. The second year, in New Orleans, I was disappointed in myself. I felt like The Donald and I were all over ourselves. It’s like we couldn’t get it together. However I was pleasantly surprised with how the ratings came back. People didn’t seem to notice that we weren’t on our A-game (luckily).

So now we are Anaheim bound and have a lot of work set out before us. (Yay! Project!) Maybe the third time is the charm. My thoughts are that it will our best seminar yet!

Yeah, good luck getting rid of that stink.

Lately I just haven’t been into the property management side of my job.  Tenants and I aren’t getting along all that great and that gets depressing.   And what’s making it worse is that some of the applications we are getting in for our available properties, well, they literally stink.  They carry odors of massive cigarette smoke, sweat, B.O. and even sometimes chicken fat.  And yes, I judge the applicant when I get something that just doesn’t smell right.

For the most part, this is nothing new in our office. I used to breakdown into a fit of giggles when my beloved friend and co-worker, Jay Reasor, would spray Lysol down the hall after a stinky tenant would come in to pay rent.  I always knew something was up when I would hear the “chh-chhhh-chhhhhhhhhh” of the aerosol spray can that he would keep stocked at his desk drawer.  Unfortunately, Jay is no longer here and it’s the hilarious memories like this that linger. (RIP, my friend.)

However, I laughed hysterically and thought of Jay when I recently opened the dropbox in my office that secures our applications and rent payments.  Some clown in my office had placed a Royal Pine Tree car air freshener in that dropbox in an effort to rid the odoriferous submissions.  Sidenote: Considering that only myself and The Donald have a key to that dropbox, I think it’s safe to assume who left the obnoxious smelling tree thingy in there.   I mean it when I say it was obnoxious in it’s odor.  The cheap version of “freshness” was overpowering and not really in a good way, I’ve been smelling it for the last several weeks and it makes me gag.

Seriously, I can’t be the only Landlord/Property Manager out there that has this problem, am I?  Or should I just take a deep breath and go about the duties of my job?

The first week of each month is when all of the rents are due in my company and therefore it is dubbed the very uncreative, unoriginal “rent week” that gets thrown around by all of the crazies I work with.

I must admit that I am tired and although I shouldn’t admit to it, I’m tired of property management.  Some people are just so mean!  I don’t know what was in the water this month, but it was especially hard for me.  There were six individual cases of cranky tenants who didn’t want to play by the rules.  The rules are clear, in writing and agreed to by all of us months prior to this bizarre, full-moon-type week.  It’s called the lease.

This last week, I had one woman who literally wanted to fight me.  She’s probably in her early 20s and ticked that she’s gonna have to pay the last month’s rent since she did not give us a 30 day written notice.  We all sit down to meet in our conference room because she wants to try to work something out.  But she starts off on a rampage.  She got all worked up telling us how we are just slumlords who are just trying to take her money.  I try to explain to her that our lease doesn’t work that way and that we require a written 30 day notice of her intent to vacate from the 1st day of the month.  She then all of sudden stands up in the conference room and lunges at me screaming “Okay, you wanna go? You want to fight me? You want to take this out and really go at it?!”  My jaw was on the floor in shock and awe.  I was floored by her “negotiation tactics!!”  Actually, she made me so mad that I was a nanosecond away from telling The Donald to hold my earrings, but he was too busy desperately seeking his camera as there was about to be a shake-down in his conference room.  Nonetheless, I kept my cool and my professionalism.  She ended up walking/stomping out.  Oh the maturity… she’s really going to go far in life. * insert sarcasm here *

Here are some of the other zingers that came out of rent week this month:

1) “I can’t wait to give these photos of this crappy house to the News-Leader to show everyone how you’re such a slumlord.” Yeah, sometime I will have to tell you about the lush that couldn’t get her address right.  But really what I wanted to say to her is “What?! People still read the newspaper?”

2) “I shouldn’t have to pay late fees just because I’m late.”  My response to this is…nevermind I have no response to this.  The Bible tells me I shouldn’t argue with a fool.  I will just send him a statement.

I want to tell all of them, YOU’VE BEEN RED LISTED.  And because of the numerous red-listable situations happening this week has got an idea in me churning… I will keep you posted on good things to come.

I’d tell you more, but I am late for my kickbox training class.