Do you give your tenants gifts?

Hi all,

I went to a seminar the other day and the speaker says for every Christmas he gives all his tenants a bottle of wine. I can see this gesture can have positive outcomes- tenants may stay longer, take care of your property... etc

I was wondering do the general PC community do this too? What gift do you give? How often? Are there reasons not to gift?

Would be great to hear your thoughts

 

Yep, Every year my tenants get given a $50 wish giftcard.

Sometimes it's the smallest things that make the biggest difference.

 

Only

I do the same but only if they have been a tenant for over a couple of years+ and payment history / property is sound...

 

I gave my tenants wine at Xmas. They really keep the place exceptionally well.

There was another thread on this topic a few months ago.

 

My first year I did - I'd only owned the place for a few months, and thought it would be a nice gesture of good will, and an encouragement for them to look after the place.

Let's just say, I didn't do it the second year............

 

Nope, we give our tenants nothing but we do give our PMs a Xmas gift.

Every year, we give the good ones a $200 gift card per IP that they manage.

We don't know whether it is a co-incidence or not but we have found that, since we started this "gift giving" years ago, our PMs are higher performing (eg phone calls and emails returned quicker) and we get a better class of tenants and tradies.

Any bad PM was sacked during the year .

So, all PMs get one and we believe the cost is tax deductible.

If one wants to give a gift, we see far more benefit gifting to PMs than to tenants.

 

"Give before you ask" - Les Brown
"Give, Give, Give, Ask" - Gary Vaynerchuck

I don't have an IP yet, I'm looking hard for my first deal. However, I've have been leading teams and running businesses for 21 years. I can tell you that giving, being generous and having an attitude of grattitude will yield more results than anything else, it's the law of reciprocity. While it seems counter intuitive, those who are not doing well should also recieve your generosity. It's not yours to judge them, but more importantly it may encourage bad tenants or bad PM to turn good. (That's not to say be a fool though or a pushover and don't take action where necessary)

 

No I don't, but I make sure the properties are in good condition, attend to repairs promptly, generally approve tenant requests for improvements etc and are flexible with the length of leases.

And aren't greedy when increasing rents.

 

If we gave all our tenants $200 gift cards at Xmas (instead of our PMs), they would probably think we over-charged them rent by $5 per week and we felt guilt about it .

 

No to giving tenants a gift. Yes to giving good PMs a gift. Tenants are the customer of the PM not the LL (unless you self manage).

 

I've heard PMs like chocolate

 

Isn't that what their 6-9% management fee is for? The way I see it is that if they are not performing to my expectation, then it's time to change PM's.

 

Very similar thread here talking about gifts also and various view points from regular posters on here.

 

Same reason I used to give my top preforming staff a $10,000 ex gratia payment each at Christmas time.

Not only did they try harder the following year but so did those staff who missed out.

In 12 months time, everyone had push the bar higher than the previous year. A cheap way to implement continuous improvement.

Same with PMs and IPs. The non-performing ones get the boot; the high performing ones get the cash.

We now seem to get good tenants who pay their rent on-time, stay longer, report maintenance issues, ...

Probably just a co-incidence .

 

Microsoft had a formal policy once of giving the top "x" staff a huge bonus and the lowest performing 5% were encouraged to work somewhere else.

That said I dont see any benefit of paying a PM more to do what they said they would do. Sometimes staff have that view too....But its nice to show appreciation if its earned.

My view with tenans is you allow them to do things that mutually benefit. eg let them repaint. They then tend to look after "their"home better. I'm happy to donate the paint.

 

My self-managed tenants give me a present at Christmas.

 

I'll get back to Andrew about PMs after re-reading his post.

 

I only send my PM a bottle of wine & a small box of choc's at the end of each financial year.

 

And so they should ....

 

its that time of year again, surpised there has been no threads of giving gifts to tenants

well, as I get older , and more grumpier and cynical, I will never give a gift to a tenant,

just last week, I had a tenant abandon a property, leaving all their crap behind, just 3 weeks after I had installed a split system as they said the old one wasnt good enough,

its experiences like this, that remind me not to be overly generous, and that the majority of the population will stiff you without hesitation