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What Does a Commercial Property Management Company Do?

Have you ever wondered what a commercial property management company does? Or better yet, what they should be doing?

If you’re asking either question and reading this article, then it’s safe to say you probably own commercial real estate or are considering purchasing commercial investment property. The answer to this question is simple, “Whatever you want them to do”. Ok, it’s not that simple. Practically speaking, the range of service varies quite a bit from company to company, depending on who you speak with. However, there are some basics that are essential and necessary regardless of your reason for needing or wanting professional property management. In this article you will find the answers to what you should expect from a commercial property management company.

The basics:

Accounting Services

Reporting- Monthly accounting reports that include, a balance sheet, income & expense statement, general ledger, rent-roll, rent ledger, expense ledger and a copy of the bank statement are the basics. There are various other reports you may want or need depending on the property and ownership type. For instance, with a self-storage property you will want in addition to the above, a copy of the audit and daily deposit report.

Narrative Report- This is a narrative monthly summary of exceptions in the budget, income and expenses or any unusual activity on your property, this report should be prepared by the property manager responsible for your property.

Collections (AR – Accounts Receivable) – Collecting rents and other monies owed. This function is generally considered an accounting function, until the point there is a problem (which is quite frequent these days). You will want a company that has a clearly defined process and system of responsibilities when it comes to collections, ask them, Who? – who will do what in the collection process. What? – what will be done. When? – when will it be done.

Payments (AP – Accounts Payable)- Now that they have collected your money, you will want them to pay the bills. Again, you will want them to clearly define, Who, What and When this will occur. You may want to define for the accounting staff the details on payment of your expenses, including when and how much to disburse to you, as well as other details such as reserves for taxes, insurance or capital improvements.

Lease Processing – This task is generally a group effort, with a defined patterned or specific routing to a number of people within the company, including the accounts receivable department and property manager. Each has a specific function and items they are looking for. However, one person generally inputs the lease into the computer. This part of the process is extremely important, as a missed date or dollar amount could result in serious repercussions down the road. Detail and a process that includes multiple layers of people checking the input process is Key.

Management Services

The Property Manager – This person is “One” of the focal points by which you make your decision on whether you hire a company or not. The property manager is the person that will make the critical day-to-day decisions that go into operating a property. Their responsibilities include – relationships with your Tenants and Vendors, physical condition of your property, oversight of the collection process, payment of bills, budgeting, lease administration, monthly reporting, generally all aspects of the operation of your commercial real estate. Most importantly they will be your contact and source of information about your real estate investment. Make sure you feel completely comfortable with this person and their abilities.

Site Visits – site visits are a critical part of any property management contract, minimally you want your property manager on your site once per month, weekly is preferred. Many things happen during the course of a week on a commercial property. The frequency of the managers’ visits will depend on the type of property they are overseeing. The purpose of the property managers’ visit will vary from property to property as well, however, here are a few tasks your manager should attend to while on your property:

Information Product Creation: Never Compete on Price Because There Is Only One You

Information product creation requires extensive preparation, no matter which niche you work within and you want to make sure that your information product has a successful launch. That probably sounds scary and intimidating but here’s the thing: this is a one time effort and it will pay off in a foundation that is strong enough to get your ideal clients to invest in your high-end programs and services without the perils of a traditional funnel. This article will teach you a few of the things that you need to remember if you’d like to invest in yourself and start on the information product creation path using your unique talents and abilities. Remember that you never have to worry about anyone ripping off your ideas because if you understand how to properly position yourself around your story.

Understand Both Strengths and Weaknesses: It is good to have an impartial view of your own strengths and weaknesses when lay the foundation of selling yourself within the information product creation process. It helps you figure out where you are, what you lack and how to move forward so that you get as much growth as possible. It is more than important, it is urgent if you want to create fast success for yourself to have personal positive reinforcement and deep belief to provide yourself the support you need so that you can get over your own limitations to ensure that your information product is as valuable as it can be.

You also need to know exactly who your competition is so you can study them and use their methods to help you improve your own standings. Down recreate the wheel, but understand the wheel and position yourself going uphill from the competition. Check out which kinds of opportunities you’ve already got and try to figure out how best to use them while taking care to remember your strengths and weaknesses. This is a great way to figure out where you stand against your competition which helps you figure out how best to grow.

Launch on Time: No matter what, even if you haven’t officially announced your “launch date” you should launch the site when you’ve said you would. This will force you to stick to your goal and actually work on it. Thinking that “I’ll launch it when I think it’s ready to launch” will only hinder your efforts. You’ve got a responsibility that you need to live up to with your launch, and you can’t move back on that one. If you get close to your launch date and you are getting hung up on your self limiting beliefs in your information product creation, don’t worry this about getting it out there and not perfection. As long as it is usable you should launch it. Launching on time is the professional thing to do and it is more important than creating a “wow” effect in your site visitors. You can always update/upgrade your website when you have to, so there shouldn’t be any issue with that.

Analyze Your Own Concept: If you want to make your information product creation successful you need to understand how good your concept is: is it really going to work for your chosen audience or would something else be better? You already know about your competition; how does your concept measure up? If you haven’t come up with your own idea and are trying to work with someone else’s concept, do some more work on your own before your launch. People want original ideas because they’ve seen too many other me-too websites already.

Test Your Concept Before You Commit To The Information Product Creation Process: One of the biggest failures people have with information product creation is not testing an idea before putting a lot of effort into producing an information product. PPC to a small 5 page site with a landing page is a great way to test an offer before you even produce it. If people will sign up to get it, you can be sure that you can create an information product that will target eliminating the pain of your target market. The small amount of money will be invaluable in using crowd sourcing to direct the final outline of the information product creation process.

You’ll have lots of hurdles to clear after the launch of your information product and the only way to truly take care of them is to follow the advice in this article to work smarter. Plenty of people work hard, but it is the ones who work smarter who make real money online with the information product creation business model.

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Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.

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