Given this weekend’s weather I thought it would be an appropriate for a brief chat about property management.  Certainly if you own one 5,000sft building property management is not an investment you would spend much time considering.  But if you own multiple buildings, in multiple locations, or perhaps in an area that can have difficult weather, it needs to be an option. 

The staff at Commercial & Investment Properties spent much of the weekend on our retail properties making sure sidewalks and driveways were clear of ice, scraping walkways and spreading ice-melt. 

Thursday and Friday were spent planning for the weather.  How bad will the weather be? Where to start?  Who needs to go where?  Do we have enough ice-melt?  All these factors are part of the decision-making process.

While it’s not a terribly difficult job it can be time consuming and the actual work takes place before the sun comes up.  Stores like Fresh Market, FedEx Office and CVS open early and the property needs to be cleared before customers get there.

CIP’s property management and maintenance staff has been doing this for three days (and I didn’t even mention the HVAC that sprung a huge leak in one of our office buildings that had to be repaired and cleaned).

While this is an extreme weekend things like this take place quite often.   Experienced property managers like CIP’s Teresa Taylor, know how to handle difficult situations.  They know who to call to solve a problem when the “Emergency Mailbox” rings at 3:00am and how things can be repaired in a cost effective manner.   

Property management can go from just cleaning your buildings all the way to providing full accounting for your investments.

Basically it comes down to time and responsibility.   How much time do you have to focus on your properties?  Is another job/business suffering because of it?  What cost are you willing to pay to have your property well take care of so in the event of a snow storm you don’t have to get up on 15 degree weather to clear the properties and avoid a possible law suit if someone were to fall.

I will get a little deeper into all aspects of property management later but given the events of the last few days I thought this was timely.