Are you looking to increase your property portfolio returns? Managing properties can be quite tedious and time-consuming. Here are 7 surprisingly simple tips to become an expert property owner in Hong Kong and streamline your management.
For detailed explanations and examples, download the full e-book here.
Measure your occupancy rate
Your occupancy rate is the key metric in understanding your property portfolio because it helps to point out how much more value you can easily extract. Most landlords try to “estimate” the number of days their properties have been vacant. However, they’re all often extremely wrong. This makes it tough to decide on how to negotiate with your tenants.
Calculating your occupancy rate is very simple to do. All you have to do is follow the below formula:
On the MyPropty dashboard, we automatically calculate this for you. You can instantly see this and make decisions accordingly. See our e-book for more details.
Keep updated list of tenancy dates
Keep track of the renewals and expiration dates of your properties. This gives you an advantage when negotiating with tenants and agents.
Beginners typically maintain a list of your properties and their corresponding contract expiration dates on an Excel document. Unfortunately, this does not automatically prioritize actionable items on your list. This will slow down your speed when handling vacancies.
A simple step is to improve the user experience of your document. We suggest simply using color priority or conditional formatting when listing out your properties. Let the formatting highlight which activities are urgent. Secondly, we recommend sorting the “Tenancy End Date” column so that urgent renewals appear at the top.
Maintain a good relationship with tenants
Looking for a new tenant is expensive. You will incur many expenses, both visible and hidden – property agent commissions, vacancy period, major renovation work – the list goes on. As for tenants, they usually do not like to move either as finding a new place can be really frustrating!
It is important for landlords and tenants to maintain a good relationship. Simply being easily reachable for your tenant whenever they need you can give you lots of benefits.
We recommend that you tally up all your moving expenses from the last time you moved out to have a clearer idea on these costs.
Check out MyPropty’s personal assistant package for more assistance on this.
Offer rent-free periods
Rent-free periods might sound counter-intuitive – it is actually a useful strategy to boost rental amounts in the long run!
Public record of recent transactions usually only show the monthly asking price instead of the effective annual rent with discounts provided by the landlord.
Therefore when negotiating with tenants, instead of reducing the monthly asking price, a better strategy is to offer a rent-free period. This will set a higher benchmark for you to when you renew the tenancy contract with the tenant the next time.
Price checks on repairs
It can be quite overwhelming for landlords to decide between many repairs options in the market.
However, even though it is not the most attractive job to compare prices between different contractors, you can save a lot of money. Over the last few years, many companies have been increasing their rates by double-digit percentages and we have seen significant price discrepancies of different companies for the same task. Unfortunately, this happens quite often as there is a lack of transparency.
Once, we helped a landlord save over $5270 for a job simply by choosing a different sifu within our network. It was a huge saving of about 43%.
For simplicity, you can continue to use the same contractor. However, as prices are changing quickly, we suggest still collecting price quotations from other contractors, so as to give you a better idea of the market price, and perhaps make a better deal in the long run.
MyPropty collects multiple quotations for all of our jobs, and we use internal data tools to track all prices by different vendors. That way, we can efficiently find the best deals for our users.
Set up alerts for dates & tasks
People lead busy lives in Hong Kong. It is easy to be swamped by the long list of tasks that are saved in your phone or notebook. But when it comes to property management, missing out details can be very costly.
Setting up alerts and notifications can significantly reduce your workload and remind you of important tasks whenever its time. We suggest integrating with your Calendar app on your phone.
Alternatively, subscribe for MyPropty’s weekly reports to see a summary of all actionable tasks.
Request tenants to set up autopay
Property transactions are mostly recurring. Whether it is receiving monthly rental income, or paying bills, most of these can be set up with Autopay.
Asking your tenants to set up autopay is time-consuming the first time, but can lower your long-term operating cost and risk of managing your tenancies. Moreover, most tenants are ok to set up autopay to save the hassle too.
Consider moving to online banking and digital payment solutions, such as FPS (Faster Payment System) to further streamline your payments. This will help if you need to audit your transactions at the end of the year.
At MyPropty, we’re developing new partnerships with sifus and agents and processes for property owners to seamlessly manage their properties. With open transparency, landlords are able to full
Want to try out MyPropty? Schedule a call with us.
