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

[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.