Rental management companies

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

I am going to be moving away for two years and would like to rent out my condo while I am gone. I'd rather go through a local management company, as I think it would be easier than trying to finagle repairs from far away. But, as a former renter I am aware that there are some *horrible* management companies out there, and I *do not* want to become an absentee slum lord. So I am wondering if anyone has any recommendations or warnings about management companies they have worked with before (either as a landlord or as a renter).

Thanks!

Comments

[ron_newman]

I believe that filigreepm is in this business -- Lars Unhjem, 617-340-6344, 411A Highland Ave. Suite 316. I met him at a DARBI meet-up lunch and he seems like a nice guy, but I don't know much more about him.

[daviscubed.livejournal.com]

Maven Realty is awful. They are the biggest (though not alone) abusers of craigslist, posting the same apartment several times a day to flood the site. When I e-mailed them (years ago) to request them to stop, they did not respond.

Please do not use them.

[dial-zero.livejournal.com]

I had a good experience with Maven. They thoroughly explained the lease to me (I had never signed an MA one) and didn't give me the bait-and-switch like most agents. I felt comfortable and not like I was rushed into anything. Can you really say they're horrible based on the fact that they post on CL a lot?

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

I had a good experience with Maven in winter 2006 (great, actually) but when I went to use them again in winter 2008, they were terrible. What was great about the first time was that the agent listened to my handful of deal-breakers and budget and found me a GREAT place that was under my budget and had the deal-breaker stuff. What was terrible about 2009 was that the agent talked on his cell phone constantly while driving with us to potential apartments, showed us apartments that were a definite "no" (apartments that were part of building for sale, apartments over our budget, apartments that did not have the two deal-breaker things we specifically mentioned) and was shady/uncomfortable looking when asked direct questions about places that we were viewing. That and their abuse of CL (my beef is that they post in the no-fee, not-by-agent sections which is dishonest since they are agents and they do charge a fee) make it so that I would no longer recommend them to anyone looking. Well, that and the fact that when I told them that the reason I was looking again so soon was because the apartment of 2006 was being managed by a slumlord getting intolerably slummy (and they rent a number of his properties), they seemed unfazed.

[howlymcghee.livejournal.com]

Before it gets that far, I would actually be interested in hearing about the condo itself...

[phoenixy.livejournal.com]

ActionVest is good at being communicative and responding to maintenance requests. My only complaints are that sometimes I have to call a couple times to get stuff done and that getting permission to do certain things--even if they would be good for both the owners and tenants--gets me answer of "No, because the owners said so" without any real explanation of why the owners or opposed or opportunity to try convincing them that they're being silly.

[ron_newman]

They run my 50-unit brick apartment building well. (Maybe we're in the same one.) Do they manage smaller buildings and individual condos too?

[ominousspectre.livejournal.com]

We had a terrible experience for the 9 months dealt with ActionVest. First off, they kept "forgetting" to send us our reimbursement for our first month's prorated rent and for some reason they couldn't credit this to another month which seemed strange.

We also had major issues with them when we decided to move out a few months early. We tried to have open communication about finding a new renter ourselves to sublet and instead, they decided it was OK to tell us to nevermind and that they found someone. It would have been nice if they hadn't mislead us to believe that the person they found would be moving in immediately (they knew that this is what we wanted and why we were aggressively showing our place). We hadn't called off all of our showings after hearing that we were "all set". We lost our last month's rent.

And an annoying detail is that our front door worked so that the buzzer would call my boyfriend's phone and it took us 2 or 3 months after we moved out for them to remove his number from the system. He complained about it for quite some time before it was fixed. In that time we got plenty of 1 a.m. phone calls from the front door.

Maybe they're quick about maintenance requests (we never made one) but they sucked pretty bad at everything else for us.

[rethcir.livejournal.com]

THIS!

I had the exact same buzzer thing - this was NEVER corrected after nearly a year and my long-term remediation was to forcibly block the number on my phone using an app.

[rethcir.livejournal.com]

I had a pretty awful experience with ActionVest, they were definitely not "Extra Milers" and overcharged the crap out of us. The rude, unprofessional and disorganized property manager lady we had as their representative to us was a key factor in our decision to sublet and move out a few months into our lease.

[dial-zero.livejournal.com]

Horrible: Samia. I think they mainly deal with larger properties in Allston/Brighton, though.

[she-of-emeralds.livejournal.com]

Oxford Street Realty, 1644 Mass. Ave., 617-354-3535. Ask for Jackie White and tell her that Rachel Schneewind sent you. I rented my apartment through her, she's great, and they also do property management. (They're between Harvard and Porter Squares.)

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this! I was getting worried when all the other postings were negative.

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Boston Realty Associates:

Pros:

- polite, friendly, honest, genuinely nice people
- very fast to deal with actual, time-sensitive emergencies, even at weird hours
- flexible and not morons. They won't stick to a policy anally if the policy is stupid in a given situation.


Cons:

- not responsive to anything else at all, even when maintenance now would save the owner a lot of money later
- sometimes seem kind of internally disorganized
- have had bad luck with contractors, which might not be attributable purely to luck


Bottom line:

Neutral. Depends on how willing you are to monitor the place yourself. If your condo is in an old, complicated building, I'd avoid them. If it's new or newly renovated and you don't expect anything to go wrong, they might be worth considering.