5 Key Skills for Affordable Housing Managers

Are you aiming to succeed as a property manager in affordable housing? Or are you a property owner looking for the right property manager who can help you maximize your ROI from your rental property? You should know the top property management skills necessary to excel in the industry.

Read on to learn more about these must-have skills and what tools can help you nurture them and ensure your success in property management. 

Excellent Communication Skills

As a property manager, you’re expected to have solid communication skills, both written and verbal. You should be able to communicate smoothly with different people, including tenants, property owners, staff, contractors, suppliers, and several other professionals or businesses.

You must not only relay messages clearly but also actively listen to these people. For example, tenants will likely have questions or concerns about policies, repairs, and other relevant matters. Make them feel heard and valued while giving them solutions and setting clear timeframes. Communicate any changes or updates as well to avoid potential conflicts or disputes.

To be a good communicator, practice active listening with your tenants, reply politely to queries as soon as possible, and adjust your communication style based on the person you’re talking to. For example, you can have a friendly but authoritative tone when talking to your tenants.

Effective property management software like ExactEstate can also help ensure smooth communication with tenants. For instance, our resident portal makes it easier for your residents to create work orders and monitor their progress. You can also send them email notifications at the click of a button. Since the portal is also mobile-friendly, residents can access it anywhere they go, keeping the communication lines open.

Attention to Detail

Learning how to drive yourself to success in property management also means paying close attention to detail. One of your main goals as a property manager is to ensure that every aspect is handled well. This includes addressing tenant concerns, coordinating with contractors, keeping the property well-maintained, managing finances, and more.

Strong attention to detail allows you to protect and grow the property owner’s investment, reduce conflicts, and attract more tenants. Focusing on the details includes organizing important property-related documents. With ExactEstate’s document management system, you can conveniently access your online files wherever you are. These include lease agreements, applications, marketing files, and compliance documents.

You can securely store important documents without worrying about any unauthorized access. Moreover, you don’t have to spend weeks to make sure you get all the details right. ExactEstate offers you detailed property management reporting. This includes late fee reports, vendor ledger reports, delinquent and prepaid account reports, bank deposit summaries, and income summaries.

You can also set personal reminders to ensure you’re not missing important deadlines and have all the relevant information you need. When choosing the right tenants, ExactEstate also allows you to screen tenants with credit reports and hassle-free background checks thoroughly. As a result, you can easily determine qualified leads and turn them into affordable housing residents with just a few button clicks.

Patience

Being a property manager is both a fulfilling and challenging role. Things can get stressful and intense, so one of the property management skills you need is patience. For instance, some tenants can be too demanding and difficult to deal with, and contractors might fail to follow the timeline they’ve set. Unexpected maintenance issues might occur. You also have to manage eviction notices and late payments.

However, one of your goals as a property manager is to resolve conflicts diplomatically. Stay calm and collected. Listen first before reacting. Property managers with good customer service skills tend to be more patient and ensure that complaints are handled courteously and peacefully.

Use ExactEstate to manage property maintenance more effectively and help prevent conflicts due to impatience. You can easily set up work orders and assign urgency statuses. You can also automate rent collection and charges for application fees or deposit fees. To make things more flexible, ExactEstate offers customization options, including user access, reporting, and system settings, to cater to your varying needs.   

Assertiveness

In property management, you’ll face different situations where you have to be assertive yet not aggressive. By being assertive, you stay firm and show strength while remaining respectful. Meanwhile, aggression puts other people down and often leads to more issues.

Some tenants in affordable housing might make unreasonable requests, and contractors who are not thorough can cause more problems. There will likely be late payments, too. Hence, you should be able to make the right decisions quickly, including evicting residents if necessary.

With our violation tracking software, you can quickly communicate violations with residents. They’ll see the images and descriptions of the violations using their mobile device or computer. Thus, you won’t have to deal with manual, time-consuming violation tracking.

At the same time, you can reduce confusion and frustration among residents. Since you have access to accurate and updated information, you can also take immediate action.

Tech-savviness

Property management success includes being tech-savvy. Various technologies and innovations, including software, are continuously introduced to help make property management more efficient and seamless. Hence, to stay on top of the competition, you should know how to use these tools.

With incredible property management software like ExactEstate, you get everything you need in one place — from maintenance, online payments, and accounting to tenant screening, detailed reporting, and marketing integration. Moreover, the software is customizable to satisfy your unique needs.

Maximizing technology as you manage affordable housing can attract high-quality tenants, retain more tenants, ensure security, and increase efficiency. Also, you can save time, stress, and money by collecting payments automatically, gaining access to real-time and accurate information, and streamlining applications and work orders.

You can even help protect the environment by going paperless. From virtual showings to online applications, proptech in affordable housing is revolutionizing the property management industry.

Final Thoughts

Your goals as a property manager include increasing ROI, ensuring security, addressing tenant and other stakeholders' concerns, and more. To succeed in the industry, you need property management skills like attention to detail, patience, excellent communication skills, assertiveness, and tech-savviness.

You can also use exceptional property management software like ExactEstate to streamline your process and attract more amazing residents.

Request a demo today to further discover how ExactEstate can give you the best rental property management solutions!

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