My crazy year with a Rental Agency Part 4… the ugly
5 PART SERIES
PART 4
The Ugly:
Commissions & Fees
The rental agency Commission and Junk fees to the tune of 51% $$$$$. They denied it at first until we supplied our accountants numbers. Then management was unapologetic about the numbers saying it was a “run of bad luck” for us.
Controlling all the money
They made us swallow it for months when fraud was committed on them by a renter and did not return the money to us until they won their case with Credit Card Company. They took their would be commissions out of our check. Yet the more they explained why, the less i understood it. I didn’t comprehend it because they accepted the client, why were WE held hostage financially for months?
Making all the financial decisions that always benefited them
The day before Thanksgiving, a renter called the agency that the guest bathroom sink was dripping. The rental agency sent out their in-house handyman who charged double time Thanksgiving Day to fix the faucet. Apparently, he could not repair it and had to drive around town to find a place that was open and try to match the current faucet, then come back to the house and replaced the faucet to the tune of $460 for labor and almost $300 for the faucet. Had they sent an actual plumber the day after Thanksgiving it would have been only $85 to fix a leaking faucet that did not need to be replaced.
Also, I was furious because all the faucets in the house were brand new, they were put in in April and it was November – it did not need to be replaced. To me it was like replacing a new car because it had a flat tire.
Why act like it was an emergency? It felt to us like they were up-selling their bottom line and we could never do anything about it because they never told us until it was over. We had zero say.
Our rental was not their priority property
The house didn’t rent much while in their care. In the end we considered that when you are a with a “Luxe” property rental company they are going to push they biggest most luxurious and expensive homes. Our home was not a 6 bedroom 5 bathroom 4000 sf with tennis court.
They work on commission.
I’m estimating, it rented maybe the equivalent 14-15 weeks and 7 of those weeks were renters we found.
I was grateful my husband pushed for the one year contract. We decided to leave at the year mark giving them 2 months’ notice. We agreed to let the renters they already had scheduled stay for future dates.
Then sleepless nights over how to find another agency to manage the house began. This gave me so much anxiety – the idea of going through it again for another year and all the unknowns. During this time a house around the corner had construction going on for months. It had a sign in front that read “HGTV House”. Every time we were in the desert we drove by and checked its progress. This time the owner happened to be standing outside and I said “Hey I just saw you on TV” he said “Yes you did”; soon he was inviting us inside to check out what they had done.
In our conversation we asked him what agency he was with; he said he was doing it himself because the fees were too high with local agencies. We found out he had made more money in the 5 months since he put it on the rental market than we had made all year, by almost double. It was exactly what we needed to hear to decide for ourselves that we should give it a shot.
