5 Questions to Ask Yourself for Choosing the Right Property Management Company
16 Nov 2020
living tips
As a Developer or a Broad member of a certain condominium or housing project, the process of selecting a suitable property management company is, without doubt, a tough duty and real challenge. Choose right and you are applauded all the way; choose wrong and you can certainly be, as unfortunate as it may sound, condemned.
But when something doesn’t come easy, it’s usually for the best, and in this article through asking yourself a following set of questions framed and phrased by our property management experts, you will be able to grasp more of what exactly you should be looking for when wanting to hire a property management company.
Together, all questions will slowly help you reach your final answer. It may be that company offering property management service in Bangkok you found yesterday or perhaps a new one entirely. The ultimate answer can start here. Let’s begin.
1. Is the company specialized in managing the kind of your property?
The importance of specialization may seem too apparent to mention, but on closer inspection, it is important to note that just because a company is well-known for its real estate specialty does not mean that it can automatically excel in other related areas, particularly property management.
Too often a real estate agent is mistaken as one with a natural ability to properly run a property management service, but it is important to note that both should be considered as separate areas of specialty.
This does not, however, mean that a single company is not qualified to run both: many large companies are, in fact, both a real estate agency and a property management provider.
At Plus Property, for example, our organization is clearly divided into two separate departments including property management and real estate brokerage, with a wide range of professionals working tirelessly to maintain their own division’s highest standards.
Also, when you finally find a company specialized in property management, it is worthwhile to dig just a bit deeper, examining its property management portfolio closer. Ask yourself: “Does the company usually manage condos, housing estates, or facilities?”
Each type of property requires a different set of specialty, and you don’t want to end up choosing a company primarily experienced in managing housing estates when your property is a condominium.
At Plus Property, for example, through decades of experiences, our property management department manages to be experienced and specialized in every type of property management, professionally categorized into two main areas of service, including Living and Property Management involving residential projects, such as condos and housing estates, and Facility Management involving commercial facilities, such as office buildings, educational buildings, shopping malls.
“We want to have one of the market leaders in the condominium management,” explains a Broad member of The River, a luxury condominium project, after we once inquired what made the Board of Directors ultimately select Plus Property, “You have a proven record in managing a luxury building as large as The River.”
2. How comprehensive is the company’s management service?
It takes a village to run a property association, meaning that whether to be a condo, housing estate or facility, property management at its core encompasses an extensive range of matters.
An ideal property management company, therefore, should be able to handle not just property maintenance but also other related important matters ranging from handling documents to handling accounting and even overseeing your partner companies/external contractors’ performances.
A Juristic Person, set up by a property management company, is responsible for selecting a competent security guard team. It is, therefore, only when a property management company is competent that other components, such as a Juristic Person, a security guard firm, can promise its highest quality standards.
If your current company choice can provide you with, let’s say, simply property maintenance and a few other basic services, consider opting for a more inclusive one instead if you feel that you won’t be able to handle those lacking aspects on your own or handle them well.
A property management company is usually hired to fully assist a Developer/Board of Directors’ in every management area possible. The less your company can perform, the more you are required to perform instead, to put it simply.
3. Does the company prove or even just shows itself as service-minded?
This aspect may appear irrelevant at first, but let’s consider this question together deeply: “Do you think what and whom a Juristic Person of a property or a property management team must interact with most each day during all the working hours?”
This consideration is one of the most crucial yet neglected aspects in most people’s process of finding a suitable property management company.
Too often, it is just easy to forget that property management, even for a commercial facility, is for people who literally live there, even for just hours, and for residential properties such as a condo or a housing estate, in particular, it is almost impossible to perform a management role well if one fails to acknowledge that at its core it is also about how to foster and ensure residents’ satisfaction and well-being.
This is one of the core reasons why at Plus Property our Property Managementis designed as not just about a property but equally about residents, tailoring our Property Management as also Living Management through a wide range of processes ranging from cultivating a service mindset among employees to inventing special weekly activities considered worthwhile and useful for residents.
4. Does the company have any concrete guarantee that can prove or demonstrate its capacity and quality standard?
As mentioned above, property management is both technical at its heart and large-scale in scope.
A competent property management company should be able to back up its expertise with proper licensing or professional certifications that could really prove how it could be a valuable asset to you, because, truth be told, we are all aware that a property management company is a key to high property value and profitability of investment.
Apart from being an ISO-certified property management company (ISO 9001: 2015), for example, Plus Property has also launched our own training institution, PLUS Eduplex, covering a wide range of specialties and holding our professionals to the highest standards.
From a member of engineering team to a Building Manager: “I had to go through a lot of tough work to be able to stand here today as a Building Manager: completing PLUS Eduplex, passing TOEIC, getting interviewed by a group of 12 committees of PLUS, and a lot of things.”
5. Does the company include research and development in its operation plan?
High-quality property management is a delicate process. While it is, of course, possible for a company to simply manage days by days without much concern in future plans or innovations, a competent one must strive for more to enhance both its own capacity as a company and a property’s value it manages.
Buyers may rush to purchase a condo during a pre-sales period due to a reputation of a Developer, among other factors, but after that, a Developer’s performance usually fades out and a property management company, along with a Board of Directors, fades in. High-quality property management must, therefore, strive to deal with today’s ever-changing circumstances to improve itself and its services.
After carrying out a customer insight survey on residential properties purchasing behaviors and other crucial analyses, for example, Plus Property was recently able to launch an enhanced repair service, under a new concept “PLUS IN YOUR AREA”, aiming to “set a new standard for juristic person affairs by expanding the scope beyond the common area and towards services within the living quarters.”
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Plus Propertyis a full-service professional real estate agency that provides comprehensive assistance in reselling/letting properties and the purchasing of second-hand condominium units. With more than 20 years of experience, PLUS’s team of quality professionals manages residential and commercial properties and also manages projects’ sales and marketing, heeding to all types of demand.
For additional information about our services, call 02 688 7555, or click here.
02.688.7555