There’s an old sports adage that “your team is only as good as its weakest player.” This wisdom can be applied to any industry, but I’ve found it especially true of property management. Successful property management requires a joining of professionals with vastly different skill sets all working toward the same goal: maximizing the quality…
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels With all of the complexities that have come along with the pandemic, researching the credit of rental applicants is essential to choosing the most qualified tenant for a unit, now more than ever. Credit can’t tell you everything you need to know about an applicant, but historically, it has provided important…
After a year and change of abject isolation in lockdown, Americans are resuming public activities they once took for granted with renewed vigor. With summer in full swing and life slowly but surely returning to normal, a sort of thaw is taking place across the country. This mounting excitement for things to come has extended…
If you’re a professional property manager, you may have noticed a new type of owner in the market. This class of owner is confident in every aspect of their investments. They don’t have to stress the minutia of day-to-day work on their properties. They live in a state of certainty regarding the direction of their…
With three COVID-19 vaccines now in distribution, the end of the pandemic is finally in sight, and we can transition toward planning for a post-COVID world. The novel coronavirus has impacted virtually every industry, and property management is no exception. Though the pandemic has brought tragedy and difficulty with it, we can at least salvage…
Earlier in 2020, a building owner in Culver City (who wasn’t a client of ours yet, but would become one shortly) was approached by one of his tenants with a mold complaint. The tenant had already ordered a mold test on the property at his own expense – he worked for a property management company,…
The current moment is a strange and dismaying one for people in all kinds of businesses – perhaps more accurately, it’s a strange time to be alive. In the past five months, the rapid spread of COVID-19 has accounted for hundreds of thousands of deaths and changed the way we go about our daily lives.…
In this time of uncertainty and struggle, amid danger and misinformation, the last thing we should do is assume the worst about each other. Crises like the current pandemic inevitably divide people to some extent (and this one divides us physically from one another), but when we rigidly refuse to give the benefit of the…
[Author’s Note: I wrote this before COVID-19 had changed the landscape of ownership, but the contents of this piece remain true regardless. I’ll have another article ready soon that deals specifically with managing property in the current climate.] In property management, we’re almost always talking about the present. When describing the benefits offered to property…
You can never be too ready. After a 6.4 earthquake in Ridgecrest this past Fourth of July and a 7.1 in the same region just two days later, Southern California residents understandably felt some tremor terror. Most of us were more concerned about what hadn’t happened than what had — the U.S. Geological Survey says…