Kangaroo Kronicles 31 – Your Worst Fear

By

“Uncle Zally” / Stu Silver

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 For many mobile home park investors, especially those that invest long distance, losing a manager is one of their worst fears. Australian investors especially have voiced this to me.

Well, we recently experienced their worst fear. The manager at one of our mobile home parks sent us a text at 3:45 on a Sunday afternoon, informing us she would not be reporting for work on Monday. There was no two weeks’s notice, no discussion, no concern for our property.

 

After we recovered from the initial shock, we wrote down a list of priorities, the important tasks that had to be accomplished right away. You should save this blog and the future companion blogs, so you can have a guide as to what to do if this ever happens to you.

Our list of priorities were:

1- Make sure the collected rents were safe and waiting for us

2- Change locks at locations that needed to be secure

3- Playback messages, call forward phone calls to our main office

4- Notify tenants the previous manager no longer worked for us

5- Handle new leases

6- Schedule necessary repairs and maintenance

7- Get the manager’s office, its computer and files, up and running

8- Place an ad in CraigsList for a new manager, and begin our own search inside the company for one

9- Contact delinquent tenants to see if there was theft or fraud

While this list looks formidable, we completed it within two days after the previous manager left. During this time, all of our properties were performing as well as before, and all of our tenants felt secure.

We will take these tasks in order, detail what we did, and the results, over the next three blogs. Now let’s get going!

Make sure the collected rents were safe and waiting for us

This was uppermost in our minds. We have trained everyone in our office to know that priority one is getting in rents. You can’t pay bills until you have money, right? You also can’t pay salaries. Employees don’t have any trouble understanding this priority.

On Monday morning, 8 AM, we were at the manager’s office in our first park, along with our handyman. On the manager’s desk was a pile of rent envelopes and checks. At the drop box at the second park, there were also rent envelopes. The commercial property was located next door to our first park, so the rents were mailed in, or dropped off at the first park.

Were we worried, about theft? Yes.

However, 98% of our rents are paid by check or money order because that is our payment policy. Any theft of cash would not have been devastating, but it would take time to show up. We would discover it when we went over our delinquency list, contacted the tenants, and were informed they did in fact pay, but it was in cash. Then we would have to check receipts, etc., and if it showed theft or fraud, we would contact the appropriate authorities. We will discuss this later.

Change locks at locations that needed to be secure

The reason we went with a handyman to both the manager’s office at the first park, and the drop box at the second park, was to change the locks while we secured the rents. We did not want the previous manager, or anyone associated with him, to have access to these locations in the future, for obvious reasons. There were other locks on mobile homes and apartments that we were concerned about, but the manager left all the keys on the desk.

Playback messages, call forward phone calls to our main office

This was also accomplished simultaneously with securing rents and changing locks. We needed to know what messages were left for the manager. Since there was not going to be a manager immediately replacing the previous one, we also needed to call forward all incoming calls to our main office, where we had people standing by.

Keep in mind, if this were our only park, we would have the choice of taking over the on-site management ourselves while we were looking for a replacement. We discussed this option, and decided there was nothing critical at the moment that would require it.

The first three tasks were the most pressing, and we breathed a sigh of relief when we realized that our worst fears were not realized – there was no major theft, there were no keys missing, and there were no messages that weren’t taken care. If there were, we would have been reminded of it with a second call, we were sure.

How would you handle this if you could not get to the park as quickly as we did? What if you were away on business, out of the country, or you just couldn’t free yourself from what you were presently doing?

You have several options, a few of which are:

1- Contact the park handyman and have him do the first three tasks

2- Contact a competent local property manager and ask him or her to work with your park handyman to stabilize the situation

3- If there is a tenant at the park that you trust, have him or her act in accordance with your park handyman, with the possibility of that person stepping in might be the new manager

Stay tuned next week when we will discuss the next three tasks: notify tenants the previous manager no longer worked for us, handle new leases, and schedule high priority repairs and maintenance.

You should take with you, throughout this series, the fact that even though losing a manager on a mobile home park you manage long distance is a challenge, it is NOT an overwhelming challenge. Life goes on, and it’s all for the best. You will find out how we turned this challenge into an improvement for our properties.

Until then, Cheers, Mate!

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