Q & A Session with Rob Brooks

A lot of you as owners are wanting to make sure that you get the right fit as a property management company. I'm Rob Brooks of Rob Brooks Realty, and this is Angela Stebbins. We've been in property management for a long time, and we understand that. In fact, we don't claim that we are the best fit for every owner every time.

So, when you're doing a search for property management, what are some good questions to ask these property management companies? Go ahead, Angela.

First and foremost is how long they've been in business—what kind of experience the team has, how many years together. And then the next biggest is how many property managers or how many associates work on the team for the portfolio size. So, you're talking about a ratio here: for every hundred properties, how many people are working? I feel that's unique to how you've structured the company here and the way that we do business, being that we have such a large number of individuals in property management relative to our portfolio size.

How does having a larger number actually help? What does that translate to for the owner? Simple: customer service. If we've got the people, we've got the manpower to be able to handle the issues when they come up. It's that return phone call five minutes later instead of five hours or five days later. The numbers mean everything, and that's a huge advantage to what we do and what we offer here at Rob Brooks. Some of you owners are smiling because some of you have experienced getting a phone call five days later, and that's not what we're about.

So, what are some other things that they should be asking? What are some other questions?

The biggest one is how a property is set up from the beginning. What I mean by that is, when you decide to take on property management, how is that property, your home, your investment, being set up for success? When we take on a property, we go in from the beginning, and we make sure we inventory everything, we inspect everything. We provide full, detailed reports. We keep those on file for all securities, liabilities, all of that. So, it's how that property is in-process, onboarded, that determines the success or the failure of how the system is going to work, because it's the systems, the foundation, as we talked about before.

So, question number one is: How many houses do you have per property manager? You ask how many people they have working and how many houses, and then you can do the math yourself to make sure you get it accurate. Two: What is your onboarding process? Because that sets the tone for how well the rest of it's going to go.

What's another question? Fees. What do you charge? Here at Rob Brooks, I believe we charge pretty much an industry standard. What we don't do, and this goes in line with your core values and the company's core values of honesty and just telling the fees right upfront, we have what I call "no fluff fees." If you go to buy a car and you sign your life away on a car note, you'll see all those extra "fluff fees" of the dealer fees and this, so it costs you X number of dollars more. Our contracts are pretty black and white, and all of those extra spots that are written on the contract have zeros at Rob Brooks Realty, versus some other companies that charge for the lease writing fee, or the renewal fee, or when they do an inspection on the property. All of those extras add up, just as in any other kind of contracting, and at Rob Brooks, it's zero. I'm a simple guy; I can't keep track of all these little fees, and I don't think it's fair anyway. So, yes, it's just simple: this is what you pay, there are no extra little fees. I wanted to go back to one thing you said: you mentioned an industry standard. Well, just to clarify, yes, there are no industry standards in pricing at all, but there is what's common. We've had customers tell us—and not that we've done a lot of research on it—but we've had customers tell us that we have common pricing, uncommon service for our property management.

Okay, good. So, fees, what else? What's another question that they should be asking?

Tenants: How do they process the applications? How do they screen the tenants? Remember, a bad tenant is worse than no tenant, so you've got to make sure that you're getting a great tenant. What do they charge? Whether they charge the tenant at the application fee at the time of the process. We have what I feel to be pretty low application fees. We do, and I've seen a lot of pretty scary application fees out there. If you're overcharging for an application fee, you're going to get fewer applications right off the bat, so it's, you know, what are they charging? How are they processing those applications? That does kind of make a big difference.

Good. Okay, another question: Maintaining how do they maintain the property? We maintain our properties, I feel, to a great degree. We follow through. We have all of our reporting. We do checkups on the property, so that goes into the next one: How many times does the company check on the property? How many times do they get eyes on the property? Eyes on the property, yeah. But our maintenance, we are—because we have the numbers of the people on staff—we make the phone calls back to handle issues promptly, so we maintain them immediately. We take care of the problems quickly, and then we have eyes on the property. In the first year, it's at least three times, which I believe is pretty much unheard of, and then in the second year, it's at least twice. So, we are seeing inside the property those numbers. And then what we do—and I don't believe I've heard of anybody else doing it—is every single month driving to the property in front of every single one of our homes and taking a photo and including that in our monthly reports to the owners. I've been in this business for a long time; I haven't heard of it either.

So, these are good. We've had about six or seven questions that you can ask your property management company that you're interviewing. Some of you want to try out and interview different property management companies. If so, ask these questions and make sure that they are taking good care of you in this way. Thank you so much, Angela, and have a nice day. Let us know if you have any questions for us.