The New Year marked a milestone at Epic Property Management: our first full year of sharing insights for property investors on this blog. With our inaugural batch of high-value content wrapped up, it seems a perfect time to recap our most useful posts.
We hope this will be a quick and useful resource to help real-estate investors easily access a library of unique insights and practical tips. Click the links below to jump ahead, or read through for brief overviews on each post.
- 5 Property Management Tips We’ve Learned The Hard Way (So You Don’t Have To)
- Advice For Landlords: 3 Keys To Maximize Your Profits
- How Many Properties Can One Person Manage?
- Flat Rate Property Management: An Investor’s Guide
- Single Versus Multifamily Properties
- Behind The Scenes: The Maintenance War Room
- Scattered Site Property Management Tips
- How Cost Segregations Can Benefit Real Estate Investors
- Managing City Inspections For Rental Properties
- How To Scale A Rental Property Business
- Price To Rent Ratio: Four Insider Secrets
- The Rental Remodel Checklist Every Investor Needs
- A Property Owner’s Guide To The Michigan Eviction Process
5 Property Management Tips We’ve Learned The Hard Way (So You Don’t Have To)
At the beginning of the year, we introduced a practical checklist of property-management tips we’ve learned the hard way. It’s a collection of insights that help our team consistently stay on track and within budget while upholding our commitment to delivering exceptional property-management service.
This post is a must-read resource, shedding light on some of our most significant mistakes and the lessons derived from them.
5 key topics covered:
- The power of checklists
- Mastering maintenance scheduling and tracking
- Navigating city inspections
- Investing in the right tools
- Creating a system for keys
Advice For Landlords: 3 Keys To Maximize Your Profits
This post highlights key lessons on how property owners can secure reliable tenants, minimize vacancies, and optimize long-term investments. Key piece of advice: find high-quality tenants and keep them.
Some of the ways to do this include:
- Offering the best-quality property on the market
- Setting fair market rents
- Providing excellent property management services
How Many Properties Can One Person Manage?
Once you’re successfully managing one property, it’s only natural to wonder if you could do it again (and again), to increase your profit and build your portfolio. In this blog, we explain that the number of properties one person can manage depends on many different factors, including experience, time, money, resources, and location.
Some of the highlights of this blog include:
- Understanding the ebb and flow of property management
- How to avoid expensive and time-consuming mistakes
- The benefits of hiring a property management team for multiple properties
- What it takes to turn a unit and make it ready for the next tenant
- How to adequately screen potential tenants
Flat Rate Property Management: An Investor’s Guide
One of the biggest debates in the property-management world is whether percentage-based or flat-rate property management is best. Both have their pros and cons, but in our experience, fixed-fee property management is the most hassle-free, efficient way to manage your investments.
In this post, we explore many angles of this important topic, looking at both options from a property owner’s perspective. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Crunching the numbers: when percentage-based management means you pay far more for the same set of property services
- Why homes with higher rents require less work—and therefore shouldn’t cost more to manage
- How a billing model that’s consistent and easy to understand gives owners more control over their investment budgets
Single Vs. Multifamily Properties: How Different Are They?
When (or if) to launch into multifamily investments is a key decision in a residential real estate investor’s journey—and one with many nuances.
In this blog, we cover:
- The changes in maintenance that come with managing multifamily vs. single-family properties
- The realities of people issues
- The many management practices that must shift when moving into multifamily property management—including planning, attention to detail, systems, procedures, and professionalism
- The importance of a quality-control team for managing multifamily properties
Behind The Scenes: The Maintenance War Room
This is a behind-the-scenes look at what we call our maintenance war room—and the vital role it plays in how we manage so many properties effectively. What started as a small room and a computer turned into an innovative and high-tech coworking space that helps us handle all incoming maintenance requests.
In this blog, we cover:
- How we use high-tech GPS tracking systems to monitor real-time data
- How we’ve mastered scheduling and tracking
- The importance of custom property management software
- What we’ve learned about holding productive team meetings
Scattered Site Property Management Tips
One of the biggest challenges that residential real-estate investors face is how to manage multiple investment properties that aren’t located in the same immediate geographical area.
In our experience, it takes a highly trained and experienced property management company to properly and effectively manage scattered sites. We believe the secret to managing this type of investment is focus.
This blog explores 3 of the things necessary for effective scattered-site property management:
- Custom software
- A fleet of vehicles
- Key systems
How Cost Segregations Can Benefit Real Estate Investors
We were pleased to talk with Terry Judge, an expert in cost segregations and tax incentives, to get the inside scoop on what cost segregation is and how it can help you pay less in taxes.
In this post, we explore why it’s best to perform a cost-segregation study immediately after purchasing a property, and that there is an option to go back to previous years and claim missed deductions. We cover:
- The What & How of Cost Segregations
- Qualifying for Cost Segregations
- Why Cost Segregations Are Valuable
Managing City Inspections For Rental Properties
If you asked 100 property managers about their favorite parts of the job, exactly zero would pick dealing with city inspections. Even though they’re necessary, these inspections are a pain—costly, time-consuming, and inconvenient.
But you can’t avoid them.
In this blog, we cover:
- Understanding the politics of managing city inspections for rental properties
- The 4 typical inspections: Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC, and General Building
- How and why we designed an extremely efficient, systematized approach for handling city inspections
How To Scale A Rental Property Business
In this blog, we cover some of the mistakes that new investors make when trying to scale a rental property business. We also explain some of the best ways to build a resilient and sustainable real estate portfolio.
Some key takeaways include:
- The 3 main components of scaling: capital, deal flow, and management
- The key to building and maintaining relationships with investors
- The importance of hiring the right property management team when growing your business
- Why we’re serious about having clear roles, high communication standards, and custom software systems
Price To Rent Ratio: Four Insider Secrets
The price-to-rent ratio is a quick and easy tool to help real estate investors assess whether a property is a good investment. But the secret to success lies in going beyond the formula—and understanding how to use it to maximize your ROI.
Here’s a sneak peek at this blog post:
- Don’t assume that what worked in the past will work now. Make sure your approach is current and valid for today’s market.
- Real estate agent ≠ investment expert.
- Analyze realistically by looking at what the property is actually generating right now.
The Rental Remodel Checklist Every Investor Needs
Our business grows steadily because we have systems in place. We use checklists, like a simple one for remodels, to keep things consistent. This has boosted our income and improved our price-to-rent ratio, maximizing our return on investment (ROI).
In this blog, we provide a free copy of the exact remodel checklist we use, so that investors can benefit from our experience and streamline their own processes. We also discuss other straightforward tools that can make a big difference in managing remodels and optimizing returns.
Things you’ll find in the post include:
- The 7 major components to check during a remodel
- Our tried-and-tested rental remodel assessment formula
- The $20k quick-take
A Property Owner’s Guide To The Michigan Eviction Process
Evictions are a nightmare. Not only because they are time-consuming, stressful, and expensive, but because there are so many rules and regulations one must follow to legally evict a problem tenant.
Every state is different, which is why it is so important to know these laws (or hire a property management company that does). This blog is one we hope you’ll never have to use, but if you do, it can be a helpful resource for navigating the eviction process.
In this landlord’s guide to the Michigan eviction process, we discuss:
- When it’s legal to evict someone
- Pre-eviction considerations
- How to communicate with tenants
- The court process
Pass It On
We’ve been doing this long enough to have developed a lot of great and unique strategies and excellent property-management methods. Our goal is to share relevant, high-value information with property owners, to help support you in successful property-management and investment endeavors.
To keep up with the latest, be sure to subscribe—and pass it on! We look forward to sharing more great content with you in 2024.