Ask yourself why you become a landlord. There are a few reasons that you would want to, but I would put large amounts of money on you not answering one of the following:
1) To do lots and lots of paperwork
2) To find friendly tenants to hang out with
3) To destroy your property slowly over time
4) To enjoy being in the front lines of the fluctuating property market
That first one, in particular, is never going to be anyone’s reason to do anything, except maybe a professional secretary or personal assistant. Even then, they probably didn’t get into that gig specifically for that factor.
It’s much more likely that you became a landlord to either play the property market as an investor or had a spare property kicking around that you didn’t want to sell. For this reason, you do not want to find yourself bogged down in paperwork and general administration.
Even if you only rent out one property, there will be moments where keeping your tenants happy and the venture ticking over becomes a demanding job. Staying on top of paperwork is one thing with essential aspects like your landlord-insurance or your tenancy agreements often becoming overwhelming. Once you start expanding with multiple properties, the workload in terms of satisfying tenant demands, understandably, also begins to scale rapidly.
Delegation for fun and profit
If you are renting out multiple properties, you have stopped becoming a casual landlord and are moving closer to a more traditional business model. Just like any conventional business model, delegating more routine yet time-consuming tasks is a must.
If you offload all of the grunt work that you find yourself increasingly engaged in someone, then you are going to find whatever you pay them to do.
Losing the tedious admin work leaves you with the broad strokes research of looking for new properties to buy, deciding which features you might consider selling, or even investigating other investment ventures entirely. If you are a landlord of multiple properties, it is often a safe bet to say that your talents are not best used by time-consuming administration.
Sense checking
It is essential to ensure that your operation can support administrative staff before putting out an ad for an assistant. It might be that a more cost-effective route would be to investigate going through a lettings agent if you don’t mind surrendering some of the control and paying a regular fee to them.
You want to be making money from your investment and not wasting your life chasing around fiddly paperwork issues when you could be looking into new ways to make money.
YOUR Insurance specializes in providing landlord-insurance-for-landlords of single and multiple properties.