Property Management Questions & Answers

hat’s a really general question and a common one.  To give you a general answer, I can tell you we are really, really, good at what we do.  Yes, that may be a bold statement but we do stand behind it with a guarantee. For more specific answers, you will find many here in this Q & A sections or please feel free to contact me (Jim Souza) directly.  I love talking property management and will gladly answer any questions you might have about Souza10.

You will not be charged a management fee until your property is rented!  The monthly management fee is 8% of the collected rent with a $75 minimum.

We have a one time set up fee of $100.

When we rent your property, you will incur $500 in fees.  $150 of this goes to Souza10 as a leasing fee.  The remaining $350 goes to the real estate agent that brings us a qualified tenant.  This could be one of our agents or an agent from another company.  This $350 fee is commonly called the “Referral Fee”.

We do not ask for any upfront fees, not even the setup fee. We will collect our fees once the property has been rented.  If repairs or other work needs to be performed, either you can pay the vendor directly or we can pay them and you can reimburse us.

Though we write our contract for a one year period, we do something that is unheard of in the industry. We allow you to cancel the contract at any time with no penalty. Why do we do this? In our opinion, our only job security is our performance. In fact if you ever cancel our services because you are dissatisfied, we will pay you a $100 as our way of apologizing for not meeting your expectations.

No. Our fee is based on a 8% of the rent collected with a $75 per month minimum but we do not charge anything if the property is vacant.

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A home warranty is different than your general home insurance. A home warranty covers repair costs after payment of a deducable.

Unless you give us instructions to consider a shorter lease, we advertise the property as being available with a year lease. Occasionally, applicants will ask for a longer lease and in such cases they often ask for a reduction in the rental rate. We will dicuss this with your should the situation arise. Since the goal is to generate the maximum amount of rent over the long term, a $50 or $100 reduction for a two year lease can be a very smart thing to do.

Like the majority of property management companies in Las Vegas, we use the the Great Las Vegas Association of Realtors “GLVAR” standard lease form. The difference is we supplement this form with our Souza10 Lease Addendum which has been developed to strengthen the GLVAR lease and better protect our client’s interest. You can view the standard lease form on our forms page.  To review our 3 page addendum, please contact us.

The short answer that you will often hear is “Vacancy periods are market drive.” Though that statement is true, it of course tells you noting and needs much explanation. Generally, when a client follow our advice on rental rates and preparing the property, we will find a qualified Tenant within 30 days. In terms of following our advice, please read the sections on “rental rates”, “preparing the property”, “appliances”, and other tenant procurement questions to better understand this the issues relating to how quickly your property will rent.

The competition determines the rental amount!  For every new rental, we do a market analysis to determine what other similar homes are renting for in the neighborhood.

Prior to the Tenant moving in, we collect one months rent and a sucrity deposit typically equal to one months rents or more. This security deposit is held in our Trust Account and can’t be touched unless the tenant vacates the property. The security deposit is then 100% refundable minus any expenses that are incurred to restore the property to the condition it was in when the tenant moved in, normal wear and tear excluded.

This is your decision. About 1/3 of clients wish to maintain a “no pets” policy. But do keep in mind that a majority of the prospective tenants are going to have a pet. Therefore, allowing pets greatly increases the marketability of your property. In allowing pets, you can place restrictions on the size or bread as further protection. Finally, should you allow pets, we will always ask for an additional security depost (no less that $300) to cover the increased risk of property damage. We also will require Tenant insurance.

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Your rental proceeds will be sent to you via electronic bank transfer directly into the account that you designate.  Transfers are initiated between the 12 and 15th of the month.  You will get an email each month to alert you when the ACH transfer has been initiated so that you can check your bank account.  Attached to this email will be your monthly account statement showing a breakdown of all proceeds and expenses for that month.

Yes.  As part of your account setup, you will be given access to our web based property management system.  With this access, you can log on any time to see if your tenant has paid the rent, generate statements, initiate request to Souza10, etc.

Most of our clients have us pay the HOA out of rental proceeds.  If you already have it set up on auto pay and wish to continue paying these dues your self, that is fine.  The choice is yours. There are no additional charges if you have us handle this payment.

All of these payments are typically paid by the owner since they infrequent, in some cases annual.  Still, if you wish us to make any of these payments for you from your rental proceeds, we will gladly do so at no charge to you.

As a favor to you, we put the utilities in our name when the property is vacant and then have you reimburse us.  This saves you a tremendous amount of time and headache as the utility companies are famous for keeping you on hold.

If your home is current rented, the new owner will hae to honor the lease in place. This means you will be limited to selling to an investor. This is not difficult as there are many investors looking for such properties. A second strategy would be to wait until the current lease expires, give the tenant notice and then put the property for sale. This would allow you to market the property to all and likely get you a small premium, especially for higher end properties.