PM professionalism question?

this is the first time something like this has happened to me, and I wanted peoples opinion

Long story short,
New tenant stops paying properly after 1 month,
go on payment plan, they adhere to it for a a few months, then completely stop
PM does everything reasoanably to follow it up,
Tribunal gives them another chance, they fail miserably,
they leave and trash the house

initially, agent says they want full payment of all the repiars upfront by me to get any of the workd done,
I reply, take it out of the bond

they then change their tune to, we need to upfront front payent of excess of the bond, oh, oops, the bond is exhausted from the arrears, we need upfront payment of all upfront which is thousands

I will be filing an insurance claim,
however I think that they should be taking partial responsbility of putting in such a dud tenant in.

 

I don't even know what you mean by "PM should be taking some responsibility", or "is the PM acting reasonably?".

What were they supposed to do differently?

 

Cleaning of property using bond
Rent arrears using insurance
Repairs to house using insurance
Rent loss til new tenants can be placed using insurance

No to your question regarding dud tenant, assuming they did all the background checks properly. It's not their fault if good people go crazy.

 

get the repairs/cleaning done as a first priority,

wait until the insurance $ come through,

and yes, its not totally their fault that a tenant they recommended turned foul, but 1 month in, id be feeling pretty guilty if I was the agency

 

Isn't it your decision whether to use the bond for rent arrears? It's not like that money would be going anywhere except for in your account. I'd be telling the agent to use the bond money for the repairs. Have they applied for the bond money yet?

 

yes they have, but I got the feeling when talking to them , that they didnt want to wait for the few weeks for the bond to come back

 

It can happen at any time - 1 month in or 10 years in. Something changes in someone's life - eg lose their job or their spouse, or get involved with wrong crowd or whatever, and things spiral downhill. No amount of background checking can prevent that.

More about how it's handled that spells the professionalism. Send the correct notices on the correct dates, keep all the stakeholders informed, follow the tribunal's procedures, follow the insurance procedures. It's unfortunate and luckily not common.

 

true, however for the lease renewal, they didnt charge me any fees , so to me that was a good sign that they felt bad about such a bad turn of events so early in

and before you say why did you renew, we put them on a 3 month initial lease, they fell behind 1 week and arranged a payment plan, and were folllowing it, plus the new lease was going to be a 1 month lease,

they did say lets give her a chance, shes a single mother with 4 kids who said one of her kids just died (which ended being complete BS)

 

Isn't it a smarter thing to do to get the repair work done asap rather than wait for the bond money to come in? (Which might take longer than a few weeks actually).

 

Insurance may want an assessor, and then reimburse your actual costs less excesses if the claim is relatively small.

 

If the agent did what checks they could(and you should have been part of that) how could they become responsible for financing any repairs ?

Property has it's risks, this is part of the deal, it is why I do not like all these people pumping it up, it is NOT easy.

 

Well. Feel fre to disagree with me.

Choosing a tenant is a joint decision.

Obviously i would never expect for the agency to compensate for arrears or damage to property etc. Thats what landlords insruqnce is for

However. I use a pm because they are experts in the area, choosing tenants. Plus they will physicslly interact with the tenant. Of which i cannot do espeecislly interstate

I am relying on their expertise and gut feelings and recommendations. If i go agianst their recommednation for anytbing. Then im on my own

However. If they recommend a tenant as being great. And then a month later they turn out to be worst in history. That to me means ridiculously bad luck and/or incompetence

If its incompetence. Then i expect for them to do what ever they can do make things right.

 

If they've done all the checks they're meant to do, what else could they have done? Tenants are people too. People can turn bad at any moment, that isn't either PM nor owners fault. It's the way the PM / owner reacts to it and handles it that counts. Legislation says tenants have to make good and there's bond / insurance to cover those that don't.

Property investment returns are commensurate for their risk and effort.

 

I aee your point

But if i had a restaurant/bar.customer orders a bottle of coke. Csn you taste every can of coke? No
So if the coke turns out to be flat or defective for somr reason do you turn around and say. Oh well.ive done my best. Too bad suck it up

No you give them a new one at your cost.

Thats the cost of doing business and professionalism in my opinion

You being a pm probably will disagreee with me on that one

 

Personally i think a busienss shows its true colours when it comes to dispute resolution


Edit: for the situation at hand. Weve had a chat with the pm and althoigh they to me appear a little unreasonable wanting to wait until the bond come back theyve agrreed to start the work esrlier which scores big points in my book

 

I think this is your problem here. PM aren't mind readers nor can they see through time. I think its an easy out to try and scapegoat them,but its nothing like your bottle of coke analogy - PM's don't control everything about a tenant. They just have to do the checks and get the best impression they can from the brief contact they have during the application process.

When one of my tenants turns out bad, my first thought isn't that the PM stuffed up - more that its just bad luck.

This is coming from someone who used to deal with PM negligence and incompetence as a job.

 

The restaurant also csnt control the quality of the coke

And the restauabrt has to takr responsibility. If it were tskrn to court the restaurant would losr

Im not saying full responsibility should be taken

Pms simply shouldnt be saying " oh well, that tenant turned out a dud after a month aftee we recommended it, not our problem "

 

Coke has a quality assurance dept where its produced, human beings do not

 

That's my point - your analogies aren't comparable. If you took the PM to court, you would lose.

The PM is entitled to say that it isn't their problem, because they didn't cause it, nor were they negligent.

I wouldn't be hung up on trying to 'blame' somebody.

 

If the tenants have good references and are not black listed what else can the pm do? Good tenants turn bad sometimes when life happens, others go AWOL and a professional tenant may jump on an opportunity to sue you or/and the pm. Provided the pm follows the legislation and your best interests I don't know what else you can do, there is always a degree of risk involved.