Property Manager

If the sink in your rented apartment breaks who do you call? It might be your Landlord but it also might be a Property Manager. Property Managers are hired by Landlords to take care of their rental homes either because a Landlord can’t or doesn’t want to.

The Property Manager does everything for a house that a Landlord would do, you’re just paid to do it. Your job starts with the basics: finding tenants. A Property Manager advertises the home and holds interviews, weeding out the tenants that are clearly no good. When you have interested tenants you know won’t wreck the place, you do background and credit checks to make sure they can actually pay to live there and haven’t run out on a previous Landlord.

Once you have tenants happily moved in it becomes your job to collect rent, keep the yard looking nice, do any routine repairs and deal with any problems that might come up. This means you’re the one who gets the call at 2 a.m. when the sewer backs up or has to evict the tenants who haven’t paid rent in four months.

The ability to fix problems yourself is good for this job, as it means you keep costs low for a Landlord. But in the case of something big like the sewer you might need to call an outside company for help.

Fixing broken parts and dealing with problems aren’t your only responsibilities. You also file the Landlord’s taxes on the property, find ways to keep costs low and track the property’s bills and rent receipts.