“4 Essential Reports You Need to Track Your Property Manager’s Performance” by Lance Edwards

Once you have a property manager in place to manage your multifamily property, you need to be able to track his or her performance.

There are four reports that are essential to tracking a property manager’s performance. The information from these four reports will help you to evaluate the job that your manager is doing and alert you to whether changes need to be made.

The first report you need is the Profit and Loss statement. This is a standard report of income from the previous month and expenses so you can see your NOI. You should be sure that is in your hands no later than the 10th of each month.

The second thing you need to review is the check register. You want to see what checks were written from the previous month. If you can see where the checks are going, you can get a better idea of the cash flow and see who is getting paid what.

You also get an idea of whom the vendors are and you can question things that you do not recognize. The check register can also alert to you any other problems with the property. For instance, if you see an increase in the number of checks written to the plumber, you need to determine what the reason for that is.

An occupancy and traffic report can help you analyze where your tenants are coming from and what marketing campaigns are most effective. This report can alert you to which units are empty, rent ready and which ones are not. The worst thing to have happen is to have vacancies that are not rent ready and someone shows up who is ready to move in that weekend.

You can create the occupancy and traffic report in an Excel spreadsheet. Your onsite manager then fills it out on a daily basis. Each row is a day of the month and each column includes number of calls, number of showings, number of applications sent out, leases signed, follow ups, referrals, leads from ad sheets, leads from signage, leads from walk-ins, and leads from merchant coupons.

By looking at this report, you can see the relative amount of activity. If you are getting activity but not converting, then you need to find out why. That tells you that you need to re-evaluate your process.

The fourth report is the maintenance, or work order, report. When a tenant calls in with a maintenance problem there should be a work order to complete and a progression of steps. A work order summary log should include all of this information. The maintenance work order log lets you know that your tenants are being taken care of.

Whoever is managing your property needs to have a work order log. You want to see how long it takes for a work request to be filled. You do not want the turn around time to be a week. Customer service must be a priority with your tenants.

These four reports help you to monitor the overall health of your multifamily property. Good property management is the backbone of retaining tenants and keeping your property managers accountable is crucial to your multifamily property being a money-maker for you.