Two ways to master commercial property management

[lwptoc]

Intro

Commercial property management is much about discovering and reimagining unconventional spaces, going outside of urban centres searching for alternative possibilities. Staying up-to-date and participating in a novel and creative changes in the industry is one of the benefits of managing a commercial property. If you manage residential properties as well, this may be a routine-breaker as commercial property management comes with some significant differences.

There are many important aspects of commercial property management to look after, and we are listing three we find the most important. 

Master maintenance

In residential properties, maintenance responsibilities are easily defined by a contract. When it comes to commercial property management, a bad maintenance plan can seriously harm the tenant’s business first, and then sequentially yours. 

Online maintenance reporting

Online tracking and reporting maintenance issues are one solution. This way you can easily follow up on anything that is wrong, call the right service in case of emergency maintenance issues and resolve them on time. 

Preventative maintenance is a must-have

In order to avoid as many urgent issues as you can, it’s advised to book preventative maintenance dates in your calendar for the commercial properties you manage every couple of months. 

If you’re working with a certain maintenance agency, they can probably offer you a set of preventative services and recommend when to do them. Prevention before the cure is a sign of good organisation and professionalism. 

Common areas maintenance (CAM)

This is a problem typical for commercial property management. The term applies to shared areas like elevators, hallways and lobbies, bathrooms, and parking lots. Possible costs for this include utilities, capital expenditures, insurance, and taxes. To avoid leaving tenants unaware of the maintenance cost bills, it’s best, to be honest with them about the amounts they can expect from the very beginning. Keep this in mind when thinking about ways of improving your properties’ maintenance. 

Simplify your trust accounting 

This is the right moment to say goodbye to complicated trust accounting as any well-built property management software has an inherent trust accounting feature. 

Although it was initially built for residential property management, Console Cloud created a feature for managing commercial properties to cater to real estate agencies that manage a mix of residential and commercial. 

Simply put, Console Cloud allows you to categorise each property as either of the two. Categorising a property as commercial will allow you to:

• charge GST to rent
• invoice tenants for rent and outgoings
• manage invoice payment and rent-paid-to dates accurately,
• generate invoices, statements and other reports that show updated GST reporting.

This is just one example of a software that accommodates the needs of property managers who have to juggle between managing commercial and residential properties. The main takeaway here is that to master commercial properties, it’s crucial that you stay up-to-date with novelties. 

Any software that can help you streamline your processes will leave you more time to make sure that both the tenants and the owners of the properties you manage are satisfied. 

Summary

To master commercial property management it’s important to keep up to date with the latest trends on the market. But also, don’t forget to improve your business from the inside, and follow up on the technology that can help you with that. The most important spheres to improve are maintenance and accounting, where auditing the technology can truly bring you up to speed.