My tenants have a direct line to my manager’s mobile phone. This is driving her a bit nuts, and I’d like to put something between her and the tenants. I’m thinking that may be a service like Onebox.com or perhaps a good old fashioned answering service, but I’d be interested to hear what solutions others have found work well. In particular, I’d like to have a call tree enabling prospective tenants to ‘press 1’ and get straight through to me, while existing tenants might ‘press 2’ and all those calls would go to my manager.
Many thanks in advance everybody for your thoughts!
-Jefferson-
Jefferson,
If you have a manager, I don’t understand why you would want to deal with tenant phone calls. I think, perhaps, your answer is that she carry 2 phones - one that is a park phone and one that is her private phone! That way, she can let everything go to voice mail and return calls (unless she is AT work - then she should immediately answer all calls.) I understand her frustration - we get calls before 7 am and after 10 pm. Quite honestly, though, that is people calling after reading the ad. The TENANTS who call at that time normally are calling for a reason! (We had a woman call one night at midnight because there was a strange man at her door. After Jim told her to call the police, he went out and drove the park. The man was never found. Your female manager would probably not do the same thing, but would know something was afoot.) You, of course, would only pay for the park phone…
I know that Fred Balke’s main phone line in his park is the cell phone he carries, and he always answers it. (He has many more tenants than are in your park.) Our office phone has Jim’s cell phone number in the answering message, and if we are out of town we FORWARD all office calls to his cell.
Maybe you need to check to find out why she is getting so many phone calls from tenants. We rarely get any from the current homeowners, but Jim is clearly visible to all almost all the time. I have, however, had to put my foot down about tenants coming to our home…we have regular office hours and are around the park most of the time, so they do NOT need to ring my doorbell to pay lot rent, etc. The dropbox works just fine.