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An award-winning property management company inducts new tenants through a one-hour education course before handing over the keys.
Winners of the LPMA Property Management Company of the Year, Map Real Estate, received the award after introducing a raft of changes over the past 12 months.
“Probably our biggest change was introducing our tenant induction program,” director Michael Furlong told Residential Property Manager.
“I decided that we needed to set the framework so the tenant understands what the rules and regulations are.
“As property managers, we assume the tenant knows the rules, and when they break them they get slapped… property managers jump up and down and say ‘what a horrible tenant’, when it was really the fault of the property manager for not making it clear what the rules were in the first place.
“If you want somebody to follow a set of rules, you need to articulate them, document them and set down a parameter from the start.”
Mr Furlong said that it wasn’t just the tenants who protested the lengthy induction process.
“We had enormous resistance from peers in the industry, our staff and tenants. A number of tenants were saying it was illegal, they couldn’t do it and that they’d lease through someone else," he said.
“The induction program is simply the tenants sitting down with one of the property managers for an hour, while we go over everything in the tenancy agreement.
“In our tenancy agreement we’ve taken the Act and translated it into layman’s speak, so the agreement is 45 to 50 pages long, which is where people started telling me it wouldn’t work.”
And despite each page having to be signed by the tenant, Mr Furlong swears by his systems results.
“We give them a thorough understanding and educate them on every aspect of being a good tenant, and our levels of conflict and friction with tenants has reduced dramatically,” he said.
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