Buying Property in USAThis blog follows a journey of a foreign investor who is Buying Property in USA, includes tips and important info for investors. Find out how to buy house in USA!

Finding Property Management company

Part of investing and buying property in USA as a foreigner is finding a reliable property management company. As a foreigner, you can’t be present in the location of your investment property and therefore you don’t have the choice of doing the landlord by yourself. Using a property management company doesn’t have to be necessary too expensive and after all it is much easier for the investor, so he can concentrate on rather the investing part than landlording. However finding a reliable Property management company may be harder than it seems.

For sure rule #1 will be to ask around and get some recommendations for local property management companies. I have used Truila.com and asked around.

Rule #2 : You should choose rather smaller companies than bigger. When the company has 4000 properties, your property won’t get so much attention and it will be hard to get some custom requests done.

Rule #3: Pick at least 2-3 property management companies and compare them. Ask for references to 2-3 current tenants and 2-3 current investors (possibly the ones who joined this year, and own the same type of property as you – condo/house). Call the tenants and investors and ask them good questions. You don’t have to call to all of them, I usually called just to 2 of each. Ask them not just weather the “property management company is good”, but more detailed questions, like:

Asking investors:

– When did you hire this company?

– Do you own a condo or single-family home?

– How much time did it take for the company to rent out your property?

– Are they often charging you some fees for smaller repairs?

– Did the company have to do some major repairs before they started renting it out? Did they do a good job?

Asking tenants:

– Is the company treating you well?

– Do they always fix any problems fast – within 1-2 days?

– Do they answer their phones on weekends?

Rule #4: Try to call the company on the weekend and see if there is somebody who answers the phone, or if there is at least some reasonable voicemail message and then they call you back during the weekend. I found out that majority of the calls from potential tenants are actually coming during the weekend and many property management companies simply don’t pick up the phones.

Rule #5: Fees – usual is 10% of rent, $200 – $300 set up fee. I don’t recommend companies who charge you some fees when the property is vacant and actually I don’t even recommend much letting them charge you fees for every week of advertising. There are companies who advertise your property on a few websites for free (craigslist, rentalhomesplus, their own website) and some will charge you $30 every week for that. Another thing is if they offer you some additional advertising for some fee. Real Property management Las Vegas offers advertising your property on 200 websites for $200 for example.

This weekend I will write about my personal experience with property management companies in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Mainly about my bad experience with Nicklin Property management.

Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 9:46 pm and is filed under buy house in usa, buying property in usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.