When and Why to Hire a Commercial Property Management Professional

Successful real estate investment hinges on strong growth and healthy returns. However, if operations are not dialed in, growth and returns suffer. As you build your portfolio, operations & management become increasingly complicated and time-consuming. When property management starts demanding an outsized amount of your time, that impacts your tenants and your bottom line.

Fortunately, commercial property management (PM) professionals and teams provide a convenient and highly effective solution to this problem. To help you decide if it’s time to bring in professional help, we’ve outlined six common scenarios for when hiring a property management company makes excellent business (and practical) sense.

1. When Your Portfolio Grows Too Large

While growth is generally good in the world of commercial real estate, it also requires operational changes to accommodate it. If juggling tenant communication, maintenance, and accounting across your properties has become overwhelming, then it may be a good time to hire a property management professional to help right the ship. As an additional expert dedicated solely to looking after your existing properties and tenants, a property manager can help you unlock a whole new level of scalability you couldn’t achieve alone.

2. When You Realize Responding to Tenants & Maintenance Requests is Taking too Long

Property management is time and energy intensive, particularly when multiple issues arise at once. To ensure work orders and tenant requests are identified and handled effectively, there must be a proven system in place. What’s more, that system needs to be managed by personnel specifically trained for and dedicated to the task.

To prevent problems from piling up, a professional commercial PM team will make prompt contact and triage decisions, then respond to each situation accordingly. They will also maintain detailed records of all work conducted. This helps you spot problematic patterns early and prevent more expensive or disruptive issues from occurring later on.

3. When You Need to Sell Your Property

The services performed by an experienced commercial PM can help you position your property for a more efficient and profitable sale. They accomplish this by:

• Maintaining clean, up-to-date accounting and financial reporting that will help you sell your property for top dollar. 

• Implementing well-thought-out capital planning that cuts through buyer questions and preempts objection. 

• Keeping accurate, detailed maintenance records that provide clarity to buyers and streamline the sales process. 

• Developing strong tenant relations that help eliminate doubt and confusion from the transition process.

4. When Your Portfolio Crosses City, State, or National Borders

A location-diverse portfolio is often an excellent commercial real estate investment strategy. However, it also limits any one person’s ability to manage every property. If your portfolio extends across large distances, local PM’s are an indispensable on-the-ground resource.

Commercial property managers take the burden off owners who live too far away to effectively handle urgent or in person matters as they arise. They also provide local expertise regarding:

• Reputable contractors

• Local standards and regulations

• Hard-to-define regional quirks.

This type of knowledge helps prevent oversights that can derail a property. It can also help you save significant money with smart, practical, and locale-specific property management strategies.

5. When You Need More… Everything

If, after investing in a commercial property, you discover you simply were not ready for all that its management and maintenance entailed, you’re not alone. The reality is that commercial property management is a formidable task. Each building poses unique challenges, and those challenges can be hard to anticipate prior to taking possession of the property.

Fortunately, hiring a commercial PM professional can lift the burden from your shoulders immediately. They have the expertise and resources necessary to handle even the most highly specialized property management tasks, such as:

• Maintenance – A professional PM Team, like those fielded by Modern CRE, includes building engineers who routinely service the properties they manage. They provide consistent responses with cost-effective, long-term maintenance strategies. Ultimately, this is a far more cost-effective approach than individually hiring one-off contractors for every new problem, large or small.

• Accounting – In addition to the tracking & coding of invoices, commercial real estate-focused accounting professionals monitor the financial health of your building and operations.  They also create monthly, quarterly and ongoing financial reports. These detailed accounting records are critical to tracking what is being spent where, whether you are on budget, and how your property is performing.

6. When You Need Someone with Expertise

Good commercial property management requires experience with an incredibly diverse range of tasks, including:

• Tenant relations

• Accounting & reporting

• Service scheduling

• Vendor coordination

• Regulatory compliance

If you don’t have experience in all these fields, but find yourself managing a property anyway, then you’re left with two options. One: Learn it all on the fly, possibly making some consequential mistakes along the way. Two: Bring in experts who can fill in the gaps.

A professional commercial PM team will have specific knowledge regarding all types of work necessary to keep a property running smoothly. With this expertise, they ensure efficient operations right from the get-go, with no time or money lost to trial and error.

Choose Modern CRE for Exceptional Property Management

For each of the six situations we outlined above, hiring commercial property management makes sound business sense. But of course, the ultimate decision rests with you, the investor. The choice to bring on these experts must be guided by your unique circumstances and goals.

At Modern CRE, we provide exceptional professional property management services, backed by years of on-the-ground experience. To learn more about how our property managers can help you make the most of your commercial real estate portfolio, reach out to Modern CRE today.