Three or four times a year, a property management company or manager should be prepared to quit working with a rental property owner. Usually, the dispute revolves around paying for expensive repairs to the rental property during the first year of the relationship.

I believe a good property manager must occasionally be willing to fire a rental property owner or at least threaten to quit. A property management company quickly damages their reputation by telling tenants they are unable to fix an AC unit or repair a leaking roof until next month. Tenants will not put up with this answer for long. Usually, the tenant will complain to Code Enforcement, Section 8 Housing, or the City. Not to mention, the tenant will tell every one of their friends about their awful landlord.

Now, your property management company is being painted by the tenant as the bad guy. Other tenants decide to go elsewhere for their housing and Code Enforcement is breathing down your neck. All because the rental property owner refuses or is unable to pay for the needed repairs.

You have two choices in this situation: pay for the repair yourself or quit. Stress Free Property Management uses both techniques every couple of months. If the repair can be paid for out of the rent collected out of the rent for the month, we will complete the repair immediately. Our management agreement gives us the right to perform emergency repairs as we see fit. We then call the owner and quit. Life is too short to deal with irresponsible rental property owners or cheap ones.

If the repair costs exceeds the rent collected for the month or we haven’t collected any rent yet, we simply quit on the spot. We inform the tenant and owner why we are quitting. I would assume the tenant simply breaks the lease, and the owner is now stuck with a vacate property. In any case, a good property management company or manager must protect their reputation in these rare cases.

The author, David Lowrey, owns and operates a successful property management company in Tampa, FL. He also is a very successful real estate investor purchasing more than 60 rental properties over the last 12 years. In 2004 and 2005, one of David’s companies made Inc Magazine’s Inc 500 List for the 500 fastest growing privately held companies in America.

Please feel free to visit his website and http://www.NoVacancyNow.com

By David Lowrey