How to choose the right management company

Based on our experience, I think there are 4 main criteria to check:

• range of services provided;
• price;
• quality of customer service;
• visibility.

Range of services

Depending on your own situation, make a first selection, ruling out companies that don’t provide the services you need.

Price

You want to choose the best value for your money, not necessarily the cheapest. Based on our experience, companies usually charge two months of rent for finding a renter (in France, the law makes it mandatory that half this fee be paid by the landlord and the other half by the renter). The fee for managing the property is between 6 and 8% of the monthly rent. Insurance coverage is a bit more than 2%.

Quality of customer service

The paradox here is that you can only evaluate the real quality of the customer service when problems arise (it’s like friendship!), which means that you never know before you actually work with them. Nevertheless the quality of customer service when you are still a potential client is already a good indication: if they are not serving you properly when you ask for information, forget it.

When we asked around us for advice about what management company to choose, we were recommended a particular management company that I am going to nickname IAM in this article. We were told they were famous and good at what they did. So we requested information from them. The contact over the phone was pretty good. Being abroad, we like dealing with as many things as possible over email, so I asked IAM to email me an example of a contract for their services. As I wasn’t receiving any answer, I called again and was told I would receive it the same day. But I wasn’t sent what I had asked for so I answered the email and never got any reply. It gets worse: Fred called them about it, they told him to send an email (hello…I had already done that…anyways…) and guess what: we are still waiting for an answer! Although they had a good reputation and provided the services we needed for a good price, we ruled out this agency because they were not trustworthy nor did they seem comfortable with writing emails (I think some people still prefer to discuss things over the phone and send postal mail, which is fine but not in our situation).

Visibility of the company

This is a fourth criterion that is very important. In our case, there is not much difference between the different companies because it’s quite a small town. But in bigger cities, you need a company that is famous, that potential renters would naturally think of. I would put this criterion before price but not before quality of customer service though, because I prefer a company that is proactive and I am comfortable dealing with over a company that serves me poorly: the proactive nice company will find a renter anyway because that’s how they make money, whereas poor customer service in a famous company might be a sign that they have too many properties to manage or they don’t really need you as a client and won’t do their best to rent out your property fast.