An Owners Prespective

GUEST POST

Submitted by Wendy W.

To all you apartment onsite managers, I know your pain and frustration.  My husband and I own 88 nicely located and attractive, gated units in Sacramento and several hundred units in other locations but Sacramento is our “problem child”.  We have had 4 property management companies since 2009, we never understood why we could not just get someone to “do their job”..was it that difficult??

Last March—2012, we decided to take an apartment as one of the management companies “quit” and the onsite just left.  We tried to run the apartments for two months and my husband and I nearly killed each other.  The inflow of requests and attention needed by residents was insane.  Neither of us are ADD so we did not have the ability to switch randomly from one subject to another—but that is what we had to do to keep up with all of the information, complaints, notices, work orders, lease renewals, accounting, reports, vendors..you all know the drill.  We hired another management company, only to change again in 16 months after more mismanagement, onsite meltdown.

In November, 2012, we had a resident/boyfriend cause a fire on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  The boyfriend—I guess this is what guys do according to the police—piled the residents clothes on their bed (she was working her night shift as a nurse) and he lit the bed on fire, it rapidly spread.  Oh vey!!!  No one was hurt, but 10 units needed to be rebuilt—this turned out to be a good thing.  The boyfriend came back to the property several times to locate his “meds”—he was bipolar/paranoid/etc—we got a restraining order against him.  He is back in prison now.

We decided to repair all the dry rot, do the ADA work—we got sued by one of those rogue disabled attorneys, who is now being sued for sexual harassment by his female stripper employees—and painted the entire complex.  So more money back into the property.

This property has not provided us with a disbursement in 5 years—the other apt complexes float this property.  We are stunned at the attitude of the residents who think if we own these units, we must be loaded—we are not.   I am convinced that the outside vendors also think that they can charge WHATEVER as the owners must be RICH.

We now have a local management company that hires only Romanian immigrants---they have their own in house maintenance teams—no more outside rapist vendors and the work ethic is amazing!

We work closely with our neighboring apartment complexes to rid the neighborhood of dumpster divers and scavengers---I personally got an anti panhandling ordinance passed in Citrus Heights, the local recycling center does not take recyclables from anyone who brings them in a shopping cart, I hopefully will get retail shopping cart wheel locks mandatory—soon.

Then there were the two women residents who had a fight, moved out and left their chihuahua for a week before anyone noticed—I had to locate a place to take the poor dog, she is fine.  The apartment was a pit—power had been out for a week, rotting food, feces, etc all over.  Who are these people/animals??