Prospective property management
After the recent purchase of an investment property, we are in the midst of vetting prospective property managers and finding whole new ways to be annoyed - and we’re just prospective clients at this point. A recent example is Barry Plant Real Estate who we contacted and asked for them to provide their costs as an emailed document. Oh no, we couldn’t do that, they replied - it must be sent by post. Uh, okay… I thought this was 2009, sorry about that. Okay, sure, send me your defined costs by post then and we’ll read them that way. A few days have passed and we received an envelope today that contained:
- 2010 calendar to stick on the fridge
- 4-page brochure about how awesome Barry Plant are (eg: they donate money to the Breastmilk Bank)
- 1-page service guarantee
- 15-page comb-bound single-sided glossy blurb broadly detailing approximate services without providing any detail but plenty of spelling and grammar errors
- ‘A choice of renal payment methods are offered…’
- ‘… the tenant is im mediately contacted.’
- ‘organising qualified trade’s people…’
- 4-page brochure on www.realestate.com.au
Note what’s missing:
- prices of services
Brilliant. I’m so glad that we waited several days for a package to arrive which contains a large amount of glossy printed material and remarkably scarce information. All of this information could have been put on a website or emailed through as PDF documents which would mean we saved a few days waiting to find a SPOTD.