Every Agent Has A Story: Penelope Valentine

Our next story comes from Penelope Valentine, Co-Founder and COO of Rent360, who shares the two key lessons she learned after discovering the rent roll she was managing for a fellow property manager was being used for ‘other’ means…

• Before and during the management of a rent roll, check the legitimacy of the leases, rent reviews, financials and arrears – everything!
• As a business owner, always monitor your portfolio’s information and statistics. Set up benchmarks and check them regularly.

Transcript

Hi, my name’s Penelope Valentine.

My story is an interesting one, and it’s when I first started property management many years ago. I was asked to babysit a rent roll. It was about 230 managements. The incumbent property manager was taking three months annual leave.

I thought it would be a great job. It would be fun, I’d be out helping people, helping people find homes, and pretty much it would be easy for three months. I think if I knew now what I knew then, I may not have been so quick to accept the role, but I did.

I had two days training with the property manager, he said everything was under control, that his arrears were up to date, there was nothing really to do. I just had to do the occasional open home on Saturday and that would be all I needed to do. He left.

The first day I got a call about a repair. The repair was in the bathroom and apparently that repair request had been made a couple of times. I went into their file to have a look at some photos and I was surprised to find photos not of a bathroom, but of a very pretty tenant. Let’s just say the property manager had built a very close relationship with that tenant.

Further inspection on a couple of more properties I found that this property manager had pretty much used the rent roll as his personal Tinder five or six years prior to Tinder actually being online. Kudos to him, but it didn’t help me manage the rent roll.

What I found out very quickly were that rent reviews hadn’t been done for many years. Leases hadn’t been renewed for many years. I had some really difficult conversations with owners and we definitely lost some properties along the way, but after months and months, the property manager never came back, I got the rent-roll in a stable position and a position of growth as well.

What I learned and what I’ve done in subsequent roles is made sure I check five key areas. They are agreements and leases, rent reviews, all financials. Make sure that there’s no major outstanding bills. Have a look at the routines and the inspection reports. You need to check legitimacy and accuracy. And obviously arrears. Where is the tenant paid up to? You want to understand what the exposure is for the business and the landlord.

The other thing I think is a big takeaway is from a business owner’s perspective. These business owners had rightly entrusted their faith in this property manager to run their portfolio, and they were focused on sales, it happens a lot. As a business owner, you need to be across those numbers. You need to understand what is happening, not on a daily basis, but at a really top level. You need to know what’s happening with your rent reviews, your arrears, your vacancy rate. You need to know the revenue, and you need to know the profit and what your margins are.

Even if you can just create a dashboard at a really high level and get a report daily or weekly on these areas, you’ll have a much better understanding of what’s going on, and you won’t have your property managers using your rent roll for Tinder. That’s got to be a good thing.

Anyway, I hope that helped. I definitely had an interesting start to property management, but I love it! OK, out! How do I look?