Property Management Blog

Most readers of our blog are holding anywhere from one to 20 rental units. However, there’s a growing movement of apartment developers who are building brand new luxury apartments with well over 20 units. For those of you out there who are planning on building brand new apartments there will come a time when you will need to lease them up. If you self-manage your properties, you should know there’s an art and science to doing a lease up well.

If you’re going to win in the world of real estate investing you are going to need to be well informed. You will need to be able to quickly and effectively assess what a property is worth. In order to do this, there are some well-known equations that you’ll want to calculate as you assess the property. Here are some of the commonly used real estate equations. 

The past few blogs we have been talking about how to keep your Chico rental properties filled by working on your selling skills. In this competitive market, you need to make sure that you’re using every competitive advantage to fill your vacancies. Developing your selling skills is a great way to get a leg up on the competition without spending any additional income.

We started this blog series with some basic selling skills. Here’s a recap:

If you’re just popping into this blog you may have noticed that this is a series of blogs about how to sell your rental units to prospective residents. If you missed the first two, you can check them out by clicking below:

The #1 Question to Ask Yourself to Fill Your Chico Rental Property

Tips to Understand Your Customer and Fill Your Chico Rental Property 

Time is your most valuable resource. The age-old adage that you can always make more money, but you can never make more time, is true. As a Chico rental property manager, you need to invest a significant amount of time into your investment property if it’s going to be a viable source of income for you – or hire someone to do it for you.

Being in the rental property management industry we get to work with a lot of different investors. It becomes quickly apparent that not all investment property owners are created equal. Some property owners are great to work with and constantly make wise decisions leading to a growing portfolio and happy residents, while others struggle and stress constantly about their investments.

When investing, diversification is usually a good thing. Typically, this blog is about residential property management, but I wanted to take a second to deviate from the normal course of content and dabble a bit in commercial property. If you’re considering diversifying your investment into an office, storage, or retail space, one of the first things you’ll need to understand are the different types of leases. 

Do you remember when you purchased your first investment property? Maybe you took a huge risk on a fixer upper. Maybe you rented out the home you lived in for a decade when you upgraded homes as your family grew. No matter how you first got into investing one thing is true among all investors – you have invested a lot of money and you will turn the keys over to someone else. Every investor wants to make sure that the person they hand those keys to is a great resident. 

When you first invest in real estate you run a lot of numbers. You want to calculate your Cap Rate, Cash Flow, ROI, projected income, gross rent multiplier, etc. Everything looks good so you pull the trigger.  Great, now you just need to keep your property rented and let the numbers run their course right?  Well, there is one variable that can’t be calculated, and that is people. You are renting to people. And where you find people, inevitably, you will find problems. It’s just the way it is.

Over the past number of years, the property management industry has seen a huge rise in activity concerning student housing. It’s been pretty amazing. In our college town of Chico, California there’s no doubt that the highest rents are achieved around our University; and we’re not just talking about a 10 or 20 percent increase to be close to campus. We’re talking a 100 to 200 percent increase in rents for prime locations close to college. It’s been a very fruitful investment for owners as rents have been driven up dramatically faster in neighborhoods within walking distance of the University than other locations in our community.