Excel template rental property management
Excel template rental property management
This article provides details of Excel template rental property management that you can download now.
A spreadsheet helps organize the day-to-day rental operations. Excel is a preferred choice, because of its ubiquity, flexibility, and agility to add information.
Tracking the day-to-day operations is crucial to understand your financial health and to avoid lawsuits. The same process is required, whether you have one, or 100, rental properties. From a high level, the information to keep on record includes:
- Property Marketing - the description that sells the property, the features and amenities, the beautiful photographs, and other listing information
- Prospective Tenants - tenants who are interested in your rentals, from leads to applicants
- Tenants & Leases - the current residents who are living in your rental properties and high level lease term
- Service Professionals - your local support to help maintain the condition of the rentals
- Maintenance Requests - maintenance and repairs submitted by your tenants, the current status of each request, and the next steps
- Financials - tracking financials, from rent collection to tax information
Microsoft Excel software under a Windows environment is required to use this template
These Excel templates rental property management work on all versions of Excel since 2007.
Examples of a ready-to-use spreadsheet: Download this table in Excel (.xls) format, and complete it with your specific information.
To be able to use these models correctly, you must first activate the macros at startup.
The file to download presents four Excel template rental property management
Rental property management may not be a familiar term to you, and honestly there’s no clear cut definition of what a property management company is or does. For the purposes of this article I’m speaking about a company that handles all operations and documentation associated with a rental property. This should include but not limited to property preparation to put on the market, photography, marketing, showings, tenant screening, all paperwork/agreements, rent collection, repairs and maintenance, periodic and move out inspections, monthly and annual performance updates/reports and usually more, but those are the broad strokes.
As you can tell a property management company has a lot of moving parts. That’s because although many people like to think of rental properties as being simple passive investments they are anything but. To manage a rental property properly takes a lot of time, effort, energy, and some fantastic systems and processes. With that said, many rental property owners get by with much less than that, which means they are most likely generating a much smaller return on their investment than they should be.
Here are some of the most common costs of rental property management:
- Management fees – this is done usually one of two ways, either a flat monthly fee, or a percentage of market or collected rent. Some companies charge this fee even when the home is vacant, others only charge the fee when the home is occupied and rent is collected. We charge on a percentage of collected rent, and only charge when the rent is collected, as I’ve always felt that is the best arrangement that aligns our interests closely with our client’s interest. Common rates are 5%-12% of collected rent, or $75-200 for flat fee. Many property managers have upper and lower limits to their monthly fees per unit (Example: Mayco has a $40 minimum and $100 maximum per unit per month).
- Renewal Fee – This is a charge for renewing a lease with an existing tenant. This is generally 10-25% of the lease fee cost.
- Invoice markup – Some property managers mark up invoices for maintenance, repairs, utilities, etc by up to 10% (some do a flat fee).
- Onboarding fee – a flat fee for handling the paperwork and data entry associated with bringing your property on board. This falls into the category of “extremely excessive” in my opinion.
- Inspection fee – This is generally a flat fee of $25-75 for doing a walk through inspection of a property. A report and pictures should accompany this fee.
- Portfolio fee – This is a flat fee that is charged monthly just to be included in their portfolio. This also falls into the category of “extremely excessive” in my opinion.
- Asset Management fee – For property managers that go the extra distance and do true asset management there is likely an additional fee for this. Asset management covers absolutely all aspects of owning and operating a rental property. They will pay the taxes, shop for and purchase insurance, develop and implement a maintenance schedule and associated cash reserves. This is a well earned fee as long as it’s reasonable (1-5% of revenues per month).