Every Agent Has a Story: Maggie Noske

Our next story comes from Maggie Noske, Senior Property Manager at Richardson & Wrench Northbridge, who shares the two key lessons she learned after both an open home and a tenant application went wrong.

• Have a checklist of what needs to be done before and after your open homes – this also includes making sure possible tenants aren’t left behind in the property!
• Tenant applications aren’t always accurate, so do a thorough background check on every detail before you process them.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Maggie Noske. I’m from R&W Northbridge, and I’ve been a property manager for 14 years now.

My story is about this one time when I first started in real estate in the eastern suburbs. I was doing open homes on a Saturday, and I was quite flustered. It was a busy day, and I was locking up and I left the property.

I had a fair few people through, and then about 15 minutes later I got a call from the office to say that there was someone locked on the balcony.

I couldn’t get there, someone else had to go, get the keys from me, and go let this person in. I had not checked the balcony, and it kind of wrapped around. They were standing on the other side, and I didn’t see them.

The lesson I learnt from that, I guess, is close the door, lock it, and check the property from top to bottom.

The other story I have is I had a tenant apply for a property, who had put down they had a french bulldog on their application. That dog is 8-10kg, it’s quite a low maintenance dog.

Now normally, I would request a photo of the dog straight away, unfortunately in this case I waited, and I got a photo the day before the lease was supposed to start, and the photo was actually of a french mastiff. Which, if you know your dogs, is a 60kg dog, as opposed to an 8 or 10kg dog.

It was my fault, I should have checked sooner. It wasn’t suitable for such a big dog. The yard wasn’t fenced, there were kids on either side of the yard.

Obviously the owner did not go ahead with this applicant. It was a last-minute mess. There was zero trust there, the tenant had lied on their application, and they didn’t feel that they could move forward with a relationship with them.

Doing it all over again, I would definitely have the photo from the tenant straight away with the application to avoid this happening, and having a last-minute disaster for the landlord.