Advice for Property Investors

Angela, I appreciate you being here. You're in your holiday attire; it's October, so I appreciate the outfit you have on—happy fall, y'all!

You're going to describe a little bit about the process once someone shows interest. So, let me just dive right in: someone shows interest, maybe they're watching this video, or they heard from another owner that Rob Brooks Realty Property Management is great. So, the call or email comes in, and it ends up with you. What are your next steps? What happens then?

First, I like to speak with our owners, to each person who's interested, because we are all individual and unique. Every owner has their own goals, whether it's to rent out the property for the long term or short term, or they want to maybe come back home to the property. We have a lot of military owners here who want to rent out their property and then ultimately return to retire here, which is smart. So, there are a lot of different reasons why. I like to meet with our owners and get the "why"—what's important to them. That's one of the things I love about Rob Brooks Realty, by the way, is that we don't cookie-cutter approach our methods; we tailor things. Every house is unique, every person is unique, and they have different reasons for doing what they're doing, so we have to match up with that. Yes, so we get to the "why" for the property and for the owners. That's step number one.

I like to see the home and have the owners walk me through it if they live in the home. There are a couple of different scenarios: we have owners who obviously live there who are looking to move, PCS with the military, whatever it may be, or owners that just bought, so they've never lived in the home. So, there are a lot of different scenarios there. But I like to go to the house, see the house for myself so I get a good feel for it, so we can obviously handle that property as its unique property. Okay, so that's step number one: get to know the owners, what their goals are, where they're going with it, why they're doing it, because that matters in the long run, how we manage the property. If an owner wants to come back to that property, then they might want to have it maintained in a little bit different way than if they were just using it as an investment property. And then there's a whole features thing too; if someone has a pool or a perfectly manicured lawn, there are a couple of things that need to change. Exactly for that reason, if it has a perfectly manicured lawn and they want to maintain it that way, then we have to have a certain level of property management, whether it be landscapers in place that's paid for as part of the lease, and that's a discussion we need to have with that owner. And for pools, we need to have addendums on how that's going to be maintained, and again, to what level. HOAs are another big issue, and we need to know whether the property is in an HOA and how that needs to be handled with the HOA management company. I know we talked about a few of these things we're going to be covering in future videos, absolutely.

So, what's next? After you've reviewed the property, you've already gotten the "why" from the owner, and they probably feel some level of, if not comfort, at least understanding of you and you of them. So, what's next after that?

Once an owner decides they want to come on board with us, we're very happy, obviously thrilled with that. So, they just signed. It's very flexible. Once an owner comes on board with us, we then sit down, go through the property as I said, and make sure we have all of that information documented. We have an owner information sheet. If they've lived in the property and they know it intimately, every property has a quirk or some kind of little idiosyncrasy that needs to be explained. So, I help kind of document that process so we can pass that information onto the tenants. We have our tenant's portal, just like we have an owner's portal. We leave that information, kind of like a binder if you will, on a how-to for the tenants. We walk through all those things, document all that process, put it into our system so by the time we're done, we have a full database of that property on file.

That includes us going in and doing a full inspection when the owners leave, or if they just bought it, when we go into it. We literally cover from the curb of the road to the back of the fence of the property, inside and out, from baseboard to ceiling. We have covered every inch of that house by the time we're done and we have it documented. So, it's either the baseline of our discussions with the owner if there's something that needs to be done prior to it being rent-worthy—let's say it doesn't have enough smoke alarms—we're also helping with legalities and making sure that that property is not going to cause any liability issues for owners. That's a big, big step. If you haven't managed property before, you want to reduce the liability; it's really important. Hopefully, there's never an issue, but if there is an issue, it needs to be reduced. And it's better to take care of it before we start. Obviously, we don't want that to happen.

So, we look at the liabilities, we make sure that we're looking at it from all angles and processing it so that by the time we start managing it, we have all the appliances inventoried; we know the year, make, and models. Lord forbid if something does break down, first of all, we know whether it's worth it to fix it based on the age of the appliance or system. We already have all the information in our database, so we don't have to call a vendor only to have them go out to get that information, which is money wasted. So, we're trying to be one step ahead with it. It saves us time, saves the owner's money, and tenants' aggravation, so it's a win-win for everybody when we do it right from the start.

So, we're just very thorough. We make sure we go through the property, have it all processed, have that inspection process done, and then that inspection allows us, as I said, to either use it as a baseline to start a conversation with the owner on any repairs that might be needed, or that could be our baseline for our security deposits. Because again, now we have another legal liability area where we want to make sure that we're setting the owners and the property up for success for any potential issues down the road with tenants, which we've been very fortunate here in not having very many, if any. But we want to make sure that we are ready for that if in the case we need it. So, that inspection is our baseline.

After that, once everything's cleared and ready to go, we then go on to our photos, send in our photographers. We do our photos, our 3D, our videos, get that all done, get it ready for the MLS. We have a person in-house who is a professional photographer and does 3D tours. A lot of these people from out of town are looking to move here; they don't even have the opportunity to look at a house in person, so the 3D tours are really helpful for a rental. And so, military often has that, and then COVID has added even another layer of why 3D tours are so helpful. Okay, good. So, we get that all on the market that way, get it on the market, and then we work with the rest of our team in getting it put out there, advertised, screen our tenants and our applicants, and send our owners a nice qualified list of whoever is interested and already approved, vetted through all of our systems, which is another great aspect of what we do here at Rob Brooks Realty, vetting our tenants.

We're going to do another video on this; we're going to have Danielle, who is the expert at vetting those tenants, talk about what she does here in this next video, because getting that right applicant—that's what it's all about. Angela, thank you so much for your work at Rob Brooks Realty Property Management. You do a great job making things happen. Thank you.