Creating Your Activity Paper Trail

It is nice when you feel that your landlord is a friend and that the two of you share a relationship of trust. Hopefully you will never be placed in the position where you are forced to prove your efforts in fulfilling your efforts in care for the property you are managing. However, you can not be assured this is the case and keeping records not only show your efforts to the properties landlord they also help keep our minds focused on putting forth a maximum effort.

Keeping tract of ourselves on the RPI form 520 and RPI Form 522 from firsttuesday free forms.

You may neve have to show these forms but they provide the paper trail evidence that you have as the property manager have been diligent in your pursuing all activities to fulfil your obligation of renting and maintaining of the property. These forms must be kept on each property you’re the manager of. Keeping these honestly filled out files will reduce the likelihood that your landlord will ever have success in proving that you failed to fulfill your property manager’s responsibility.

The goal of each property manager is to put forth the maximum effort to locate the needed tenants to rent every vacant unit as soon and ethically as possible. Ethically calls for you to rent them for the fair market value of the property. You will need to crunch the numbers because being a landlord is a business and it may be worth wile to have a few less filled units and more profit than to under charge and have every unit full.

 (When I first started contracting, I was winning almost every bid I submitted for potential project. It took me a while to find the 80/20 rule. (80% of your income will come from 20% of your clients.) After analyzing this fact closely I discovered that some clients aren’t for me. I did not need those over demanding, underpaying projects. In fact, accepting them kept me from finding the 20 percenter’s who pay for the work you provide at the going rate. By picking and choosing the proper projects you may not win as many projects but the one you win will provide you a better income and be less demanding on you. Sometime not getting the project was the best route to financial freedom.)

Keeping this simple form keep you focused and keep you on tract to maximizing the profit of the properties you are managing. Failing to keep your appointments is unforgivable and when you are dealing with over barring constantly requesting favors tenants you are going to miss some appointment. I have been asked to feed the livestock or other task the owner should perform. When you explain that your time away from your tasks cost you money and that you’d be glad to feed the livestock but you will need to be compensated for the opportunity cost of not moving through your tasks in an efficient and timely manner people tend to find someone else, maybe themselves) to perform the task and they respect you as a professional.

When you as the property manager cannot in a timely and professional manor fulfill your management task you’ve undertaken then you need to learn to say no or delegate some of the tasks you are asked to perform to the administrative employees or other managers as the property manage you have been given the oversight to supervise and employ. You doing everything may not be saving money it may be costing them the loss of income. These forms will help you determine where that happy medium is.

Note: Images on this blog site are from a free source or taken by the author. No image or group of photos is intended to represent the people the author serves. The author does not care about Race (that is a politically correct term that he does not like because we are all of the same Race, the Human Race. He prefers the term ethnicity, color, religion, sex, gender, marital status, disability, genetic information, national origin, source of income, Veteran or military status, ancestry, citizenship, primary language or immigration status.) He is a service provider for all people. We will all rise together when we band together and help one another. Joseph Erwin is a Real Estate Broker, DRE # O2131799, and a CA general contractor # B 696662. He’s a member of the CRMLS and The East Valley Association of Realtors located in the Inland Empire region of Southern California. This writing is not to be used as legal counsel the author is not a lawyer and does not give legal advice other than consult a lawyer before acting.