Hey, everybody. Matthew Whitaker is back with another video about questions owners ask. Today's video is entitled "5 reasons you would use a property manager for your Atlanta rental home". So let's take a look at them. I've got my notes here.
#1 Marketing Reach.
One thing you need to realize about a property manager is that we have a huge reach audience. Our website currently, Evernest website, gets about 15,000 hits a month just for people that are looking for homes for rent. So you can imagine that our reach is even bigger than just the Zillows and the Trulia's. Now, we do post things on the Zillows and the Trulias, but we reach a lot more people. We're able to rent houses off of other houses that have already been rented. So if you just have one house, then you're not getting a number of leads that are looking in a certain ZIP code. And we can come back and find out, "Hey, somebody's looking in the same ZIP code." We can rent houses off of other houses. So number one, we should be able to rent houses faster just because of our marketing reach.
#2 Higher Quality Residents
They want professional management help. And bad residents, or at least the ones that are the professional scammers, are looking for people that don't know what they're doing. And so they steer clear of the property managers and will look for unsuspecting one-off homeowners. They know that one-off homeowners typically don't screen their residents because they don't have the ability to screen their residents and/or will cut corners and rely on gut feel. So they will come find you, pursue you, versus professional property managers. We have underwriting criteria and systems for smelling those people out. They know it. So they just won't come to us.
#3 In-House Communication & Maintenance
Typically, people that our clients have a day job. They're not full-time in property management. So what happens when you're at work? What happens when you're doing something else on the weekend and, you know, somebody calls in, a resident calls in? They've got a maintenance issue. So it's very important to have full-time people answering the phones and that way we can get on maintenance items very quickly.
#4 Rent Collection
It's very important that somebody's pursuing collecting the rent. We have all sorts of bells and whistles, from a collection standpoint, to stay on top of collecting rent. But another thing that we do is we have all sorts of bells and whistles to make it easy to pay rent. So, residents, can ACH deposit their money into our account. They can auto-draft their check every month. Just we make it super easy for them to pay rent.
#5 Landlord-Tenant Laws And Fair Housing Laws
Just because you don't know the law does not mean you don't have to follow it. And one of the biggest problems I've seen is people are going outside of either state landlord-tenant law or going outside fair housing laws, and that's going to get them into trouble. We live and breathe these laws every day and I think it's important you don't trip yourself up by trying to wade through those laws on your own.
