MANAGING
Appointing a Property
Management Company
Hands off Buy-to Let investing
BY MONIQUE TERRAZAS
U
sing a rental management company brings
together two vital aspects of a property
investment strategy – Other People’s Money
(OPM) and Other People’s Time (OPT).
To increase your return on investment, you need to
use OPM in order to build your property portfolio.
This means, in addition to using the banks’ money
to acquire property, having tenants to cover most,
if not all of your bond repayments. But managing
tenants is not for the faint-hearted and can take up
a considerable amount of time. For this reason, smart
investors use OPT – in this case, rental management
companies, to manage their investment properties.
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Managing a rental property involves four distinct
steps, which provide insight into why using a rental
management company is so critical to ensure the
success of your investment strategy.
How can a rental management company help an
investor deal with each step?
Rental management steps:
• Finding, screening and selecting a tenant.
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Residential Handbook 2016/17
Placing the tenant.
Managing the tenant and the rental property.
Terminating the lease.
Each one of these steps can be time consuming
and may involve a myriad of legal implications and
mountains of paperwork. If you have another career
in addition to investing in property, or if you have
several rental properties, managing your tenants and
rental properties can consume so much of your time
that you may not be able to focus on what is really
important – identifying new opportunities to expand
your portfolio.
Finding, screening and selecting a tenant
Rental management companies specialise in finding,
screening and selecting tenants, and as such, they can
do it faster and better than an investor can.
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