Property Takeover & Operations - Multifamily Acquisition Checklist Part 11

All right everybody, you made it. You're closing the property. It's time to take over that property now and start operating here right. So the first thing you want to do is send over the recorded deed and/or the bill of sale over to the property manager company. That allows the property management company to transfer all the utilities and other things like that over into your new name. You also want to provide the property management company with an email address or email addresses of everybody you want to receive your KPIs and your occupancy snapshot, as well as anywhere you want to include it on the owner portal if your PM has an owner portal. For example, RPM uses AppFolio, which is awesome. Additionally, you want to make sure that you arrange for takeover between the seller and the property management company. Make sure that somebody's there on site, what time, what day they're going to meet there. Hopefully, or most likely, it's going to be the day of closing and hopefully in the morning, so you're going to take over right once that money is wired across. You also want to make sure that you set up a KPI spreadsheet tracker and send that to the property management company. I recommend Google Sheets for this, just so everybody has ease of access and things like that. If you want to peek behind my KPI spreadsheet and how we track during asset management, please feel free to reach out to us. I'm more than happy to share that with you. Also, you want to set up a weekly recurring meeting with the property manager, whether that's the regional and the on-site property manager, just to discuss operations and execution and business plan to see how your property is doing. And you want to check the inventory list for shop and office equipment remaining on the property right. All that equipment that was identified as conveying, you want to make sure that that is actually physically there. Even though you did the walkthrough leading to closing, the final walkthrough at the time of takeover, you want to make sure you take inventory of everything that's on the property. You want to obtain an itemized rent roll including tenant charges, water charges, etc., and a detailed security deposit list for each resident as well. You want that current the day you take over, so you can make sure that you understand who's paid that month, who hasn't, because you have to prorate the owner for the months that he had, and especially you want to make sure that you're accounting for the people who paid and who haven't paid that month right. Next, you want to obtain several different items, and we're going to break these up a little bit here. But you want to obtain utility account numbers, you want to obtain account numbers for the internet and the phone, trash, alarm system, security, the lawn care, anything like that. You also want to obtain any construction blueprints or plumbing layouts that the previous owner has, so that makes things a lot easier when you're doing new projects on the property. You also want to obtain a delinquency report for each of the residents and a credit detail report for any resident with a delinquent or credit balance. Another list of items that you're going to want to obtain after takeover is that you're going to want the property map, you're going to want any digital photos of the asset, you're going to want digital floor plans, the digital logo. You're going to want to obtain the current tenant ledgers left in each residence file. You're going to want all of those vendor contracts. You're going to want the passwords to any alarm codes and computers, the gate code or the contact for the gate code, any certificates for the pool if you have one. You're going to want those outstanding work orders, and that's really important because you're going to want to make sure that your maintenance person gets to those right away. You're also going to want to get the contact info for the person that you're going to be corresponding with if you have any questions after acquisition. I know this list might be long, but there are a lot of things that you're going to have to do in acquiring this asset. Once you get this asset during operations, again, please send those periodic thank you cards and the gifts to the on-site staff. You know, your property manager is pretty much taking care of your baby, so you want to make sure that they are treated right as well during operations. Also, do the periodic phone call to cheerlead your on-site staff, and that's not just during the weekly phone call right. Send in those emails and be like, 'Hey, you're doing a really great job. I really appreciate everything that you're doing.' And then also during operations, drop by the property as often as you think is necessary, but you want to remember that you chose this property manager because you have confidence in them. So go as you see fit and as needed and what your business plan needs. And that wraps up everything you need to do during property takeover and operations. Congratulations, you made this part. You're now operating this company. That's awesome.