What does management of your property portfolio entail

Making money out of property involves more than just buying and selling properties. It also involves the proper and efficient management of the properties that you own as part of your property portfolio.

If you want to make a name for yourself as a residential or commercial landlord that attracts the best quality tenants, then you need to be an efficient landlord that takes care of his/her tenants needs. In the property business, your tenants are your clients and they must be treated like valuable clients if you want to be successful.

The most important aspect of the above, however, is finding the right tenants and signing them up on the right terms. I often hear horror stories about tenants who don't pay and are impossible to evict. Tenants like this are the road to bankruptcy in the property game. The way to avoid getting tenants like this is to use a reputable company to assist you in finding the right tenants for your property. These companies will administer every aspect of the procuring of a tenant such as:

• advertising the space that is available
• performing credit checks
• collecting references from previous landlords
• interviewing and screening of tenants
• finalisation of lease agreements
• collection of deposits

Landlords who find themselves stuck with horror tenants are usually the ones that signed up the first tenant that showed an interest in their property without doing a proper due diligence on the tenant.

For watertight lease agreements to sign up residential and commercial tenants, please click on to the precedent residential and commercial lease agreements. Please finalise these leases with the assistance of a commercial attorney to ensure that the leases are compatible with your particular property and tenant.

Besides finding and signing up the correct tenant for your property, there are a number of ongoing administrative functions that must be performed, namely:

• monthly rental collection and issuing of statements
• recoveries of municipal charges from tenant such as electricity, water, sewerage etc
• income and expenditure accounts
• vat returns
• maintenance of the property
• insurance

If you are not able to manage your properties properly on a full time basis I highly recommend that you make use of the services of a property management company. For what I believe is a reasonable fee, these companies can take away all the headaches of efficiently running and administering your property portfolio.