Keeping your cool as a property manager

  • Posted by Member Services
  • On October 1, 2021
  • 0 Comments

It’s easy to raise your voice as a property manager; we have a list of helpful tips to keep you calm and get the message through to your tenants!

Losing your cool isn’t cool. And as fellow property managers, we understand entirely that communicating or attempting to communicate with unresponsive tenants can be challenging and sometimes lead to misunderstandings and, in worst-case scenarios, the destruction of property. Here are a few tips to assist you in keeping your cool while delivering your messages.

It starts at home.

We are big proponents of getting ahead of the issue before it arises. When you have new tenants, we encourage you to have a specific walk kind of like how dealerships do with car rentals, show them how things work, don’t assume everyone knows how to work every appliance, so examine all devices, especially the larger expensive ones like the stoves, washers, dryers and the one that causes the most calls to landlords; wifi.


Make it interactive, have them point out any issues such as cracks or missing nobs on appliances and show them that you are noting those down and keep those in mind so that they know that you know that they know; it’s a bit confusing but moving on.

This may be time-consuming, or you may not be able to find the time to have a complete walkthrough, or maybe not be able to because of the pandemic; in this case, we recommend being even more proactive by making instruction sheets!

We encourage you to show people what and how to use this and use pictures as all people can understand images! Sometimes you can even be lucky enough to find ready-made instruction sheets for your appliance or a similar online; other times, if you feel creative, you could make your own! The one above took about five minutes to make – from picture taking to inputting into Canva and designing. It may seem daunting, but the time you take now to do this might save you late-night phone calls about “why the washer won’t turn on.”

Next up, be clear about contact times, everybody needs a break, and we can’t do all our jobs at once; while we encourage property managers to be as responsive as possible, we understand this is not always the case. Make sure to communicate this with your tenants; if you are unavailable after 9:00 pm-6:00 am, share this early on, but encourage them to contact you still whenever and be sure you to communicate a time-period in which you will respond if they happen to message you during your available hours. We also recommend having a contact method to get in touch in case of an emergency during your off-hours.

Speaking of emergency, define emergency. As we said, your time is precious, and people have different descriptions of an emergency. Sometimes something may freak tenants out that is an easy fix, but if you don’t communicate how simple it is to fix, they worry and are more likely to attempt to fix it improperly and potentially make the problem worse. Make sure to leave your emergency number on a card with the definitions of types of emergencies, again with pictures! Kind of like this:

Being transparent and consistent about contact is an excellent method to assure communication isn’t abrupt.

These are a couple of proactive ways in which you can save yourself some time and energy.