Being a property manager is always a challenge dealing with properties and people. The nature of properties is that things will malfunction from time to time. Sure some problems can be minimised by keeping up your maintenance like cleaning your gutters and inspecting drain gullies regularly. However, things do still fail, like burst water pipes and so forth. Landlords need to educate tenants about leaks and other issues so repairs can be attended to before property damage occurs.
Well, last week I was disturbed from a deep sleep by the telephone ringing. Knowing that some people like to listen to my answer phone or leave me loving messages, I always wait till it rings for the second time. I tumbled out to politely answer as if it was normal to be taking calls at midnight. On the end of the phone was one normally lovely tenant who had become hysterical. “I have water coming out of my light bulbs!”, she screamed.
Knowing that is an impossible thing to happen I took a deep breath and extracted a bit more information. “It is dangerous here!”, she wailed. I have rung an electrician and he says I need to get a plumber up in my ceiling right now. So I told her “What you need to do is turn the water off at the mains. The toby is right beside your front door. Lift the black lid and turn the knob clockwise”.
“No!”, she wailed. “The electrician said having water on the wires is dangerous. My son and I are going to be electrocuted. I need a plumber to crawl into my ceiling right now tonight to fix the problem. You are not an electrician he knows more than you!”.
I had to say “sorry lady but your understanding of such things is defective”. I said, “If you will not turn off the water, I will get dressed and drive across town to turn off the water for you”. And that is what I did, despite the ever increasing abuse continuing until I hung up. I probably could have fixed the plumbing problem myself but called the plumber in the morning. The strange thing is he could not find any sign of a water leak. I just wonder what the problem was?
Two days go by and another lady tenant rings. “We have an emergency. My husband was hosing down the house cleaning it before we left the tenancy and the water hit the mains lead in cable and lots of flames came out. You understand about houses. What should we do? I am worried that we might have a fire”.
I rushed down to the house, deduced that the pole fuse had blown, calmed the nerves of the great conscientious tenant, and arranged for the electrician to repair the cable. No big deal. These things happen.
Isn’t it sad? Here we have two normal intelligent people, two problems, neither of which were of my making and two outcomes. The first has destroyed a great relationship with a great tenant who has been in the house for the last three years. The second event has created good will and we have parted on the best of terms. I just wonder how someone else would have handled the problems. Could I have handled it some other way?
In our business it is inevitable that there will be some damaged houses and damaged relationships. There is no way to avoid these problems. What landlords need to do is to not be the one that gets hurt doing the correct thing.
Glenn Morris is the owner of Nelson property management company, “Glenn’s Vacancies”, managing residential and commercial investments. He is the current secretary of the Nelson Property Investors Association. He was active in the review of the RTA and is a well-known figure in the property investment community. He has a reputation for effectively managing difficult tenancies.”
