Looking for some input, we have a small portfolio of ~140 spaces over half a dozen parks within an hour or two of each other. Currently have a hodge podge of management. It’s not really large enough to bring in a regional manager and I find my attention isn’t focused enough due to other unrelated business growth. Pain point is just keeping up with collections, general bookkeeping, getting notices out, paying attention to the P&L.
I’ve considered going full third-party, but obviously would want to proportionally reduce current on-site management expenses.
Suggest sell the conglomeration of 6 parks and have a minimum of say 60 sites for efficiency of just 2 or 3 parks near to each other or just ONE great park your family would be conformable living there even if you never do. Great parks are always a good investment. If you have one of those exceptional parks, we are cash buyer can close in 15 days depending on title work.
Carl, the value for some investors is in the little parks. The bigger parks are much more competitive to purchase at good cap rates.
We run parks in various states and took away collections, invoicing, P&L, meter reading, from the onsite managers a long time ago. The consistency and talent was just not good enough for part timers. Our onsite managers really only hand out eviction notices, verify contractor work, and send photos and video’s as requested. All else is done offsite by our central team.
If you want to do something similar but don’t want full management, we can bring you under our system. We would use your or our website to have a community webpage, collect money online, by postal mail, or cash (at WalMart, etc.) and automatically deposit it in your account using PayLease. We would handle all collections, review late payers, and process payment plans or evictions per your preferences. We would make sure the books are correct, forward phone calls, emails, and text/SMS to our customer service team, open service tickets, process invoices for us or you to approve and pay. We could even have you use our Rent Manager instead of subscribing on your own if you wish. Basically, we do all the admin but not the physical onsite work. All of this could be setup so that you could revert back to you in the future very easily.
All of this can be tailored to what you prefer. We could even hire and manage onsite managers and show up onsite periodically, but that would probably be more in line with full property management.
I suggest using a good Management Software system.
We use Manage American. It has some KEY features that I LOVE.
On the Login Screen you can get easy access to the “Balances Due” report. Easily switch between parks and at your finger tips you know exactly who owes what. There is even a column for amount owed with Pending. Each customer gets their own online portal, they can pay online, via ACH or CC. We are also integrated with Paylease. Supervisor can easily create Eviction notices and email them to on-site staff fpr delivery. I am very pleased with this system.
We have one park with 100% online/portal payments. The rest of the Parks are floating around 50-80% no touch for rent collections. This allows on-site staff to focus or running the park instead of tracking down rents and running to the bank or making deposits etc.
Draw back. It’s expensive. Fees include, monthly minimum charges and payment processing charges. However, it saves me more than enough time and headache. IE I can drill down to any tenant’s ledger in just a few key strokes. We can turn on and off the ability for a resident to pay online etc. It also has QB integration. So we can update our QB for Rent vs Utility income easily. If you don’t use QB they provide a report that delineates exactly where the income comes from ie water, sewer, rent, storage, late fees, etc.
Another Drawback is timing. Some ACH payments take 2-3 days to process. CC payments are typcially received within 24 hours of payment if not same day.
For 140 spaces I’d estimate you’d spend $200-300/month . The time savings was worth it for me. No more Excel spreadsheets, Manual tracking of Credits and Balance Forwards.
While we do not use the feature, they do offer a bookkeeping function, included in the subrscription.
