The Real Estate Thinker

There isn’t much that is glamorous in property management. It’s a necessary service to protect the value of your real estate assets, but nothing to get excited about – kind of like going to the dentist, but a lot less painful.

Traditionally, property management has been a reactive business. Property managers spent a lot of their time going around putting out fires (metaphorically speaking, of course!), and the best ones get very good at it.

But that’s not a very efficient way to operate, if you think about it. You sit and wait for financial statements to come in so you can determine the extent of the financial impact to your budget and then you figure out what to do next. It could take weeks. . . How can you get ahead of problems and take care of them before they emerge?

So we sat down and thought about what we could do to get ahead of issues. The result is a new reporting system that we use to provide our clients with a comparison of expenditures to date and remaining budget to annual budget. In a few strokes it sketches a quick outline of their financial picture. Then we can sit down with the client to determine what corrective actions (if any) are needed to maintain the financial integrity of their property or association. This way issues get nipped in the bud and never have a chance to grow too big. Most importantly, it saves times and money, because little problems cost a lot less to fix.

In the end, it all comes back to how you answer this question: what is property management all about? The way we see it, our responsibility is to protect, maintain and preserve the aesthetics and value of the client’s real estate and being proactive about spending and budgets is one way to do it.