Ways to Take the Stress Out of Managing Your Rental Property

Stressed about Your Rental Property?

Overseeing a rental property business can turn into a massive headache for some people. For other people, though, it seems like a breeze. Whatever challenges they encounter, they find ways to overcome them. It seems as if their entire business comes close to running itself, and the work that they need to put into maintaining it day-to-day is minimal. When the entrepreneurs who are struggling see this, it can send their blood to a high boil. This begs the question: why is it easier for some people than it is for others? Why do some people lag behind while others hit their stride?

If you yourself are stressed about your rental property right now, then you can probably relate to all this. You have seen firsthand what the stress of a rental property business can morph into overnight – how daunting it can seem, how impossible solutions are to find. This is the nature of

any business difficulties, of course: one tends to follow the other so that when you are already stumbling under the pressure, more pressure is going to find its way onto your shoulders sooner rather than later.

The answer to your question – ​Can I do better? –​ is yes. Here's how. 

Set Up a System for Yourself

Taking your organization efforts, a step further, sketch out systems that you can use for your rental property business. This may be a step-by-step process for every booking that you handle, or it could be a chain of command for supervising cleaning and other necessary tasks. By turning every area of your business into a system, you are setting it up to run independent of your oversight. You can step away for a day or even a week when you need a breather, recharging when your stress has reached peak levels. While you are setting up your system, do yourself a favor and find some extra booking support too. You can connect with a property manager or co-host at​ ​Cohostmarket​ to make your system world-class, sourcing skilled professionals who are eager to serve.

Learn to Delegate

Instead of trying to complete every task large and small all on your own, learn to delegate tasks to professionals and people you trust. Whenever you are able to pass something off to someone else and ​know​ that they are going to follow through on it, you free yourself up to focus on other areas that need your attention. Eventually, you will find yourself looking upward and outward, using your newfound time and energy to expand your business, but for now, it could just mean the difference between a good Monday and a bad one.

Improve Your Communication Skills

While organizing your work and setting up systems are concrete methods that you can adopt immediately, working them into your rental property business within a day if you commit to them, there is another, more abstract method that will make an even more significant impact in the long term: improve your communication skills. Study the great communicators – think writers, public speakers, actors, and leaders – and see how they connect with people. Most importantly, learn to listen when others are speaking so that you hear them the first time, avoiding friction later on.

Get Yourself Organized

While it may seem like you can keep track of all your work and all your responsibilities by listing them on Post-It Notes for yourself, sticking them somewhere that you will see them (hopefully) and counting on your memory to take care of the rest, these makeshift systems ​never​ scale properly. If you want to avoid the stresses inherent to a rental property business, you need to adopt some organization strategies. This could be as simple as a daily planner or as complex as a multi-page spreadsheet. Figure out with organization strategies work for you and then stick to them.

Trust Your Own Ability

Once you have followed the first four methods for ​taking stress out of your rental property business, step back, breathe, and remember this: you built this business yourself. If you have made it this far, then ​certainly​ you can keep on going. If you have managed to do everything that you have done up to this point, then there is nothing that is going to stop you from continuing to move forward and grow. Anything that tells you otherwise is ​wrong​, and at the end of the day, you can trust your own ability – to run your business properly and to overcome whatever obstacles are in your path.

The Future of Your Business

Picture this: it is a year from now, and you are sitting on a beach somewhere. You sip a drink, something colorful, something with a piece of fruit stuck to the side. The waves lap up against the shore. You breath a deep, long sigh, and you think to yourself, ​This is the most relaxed I have ever been​. While it would be unfair to credit ​everything​ about this picture to the methods you adopted in an effort to take the stress out of your rental property business, ​some​ credit is appropriate. You did this, you made this happen, and it is all paying off.

For many entrepreneurs, this picture describes exactly why they decided to launch their rental property business in the first place. They wanted to escape the chains and shackles of their day jobs, to break away from desks once and for all and do something of their own. In the process, though, they may have run into a stress point or two. Fortunately, there ​are​ ways out.