A monthly statement for property owners who live abroad

A lot of the property managed in Greece belongs to people who do not live near it. Greeks in Germany, Australia or the United States who inherited a flat in Thessaloniki. Foreign buyers with a house in Halkidiki. Families in Athens with an apartment on an island. They rely on a manager to collect the rent, handle the tenants and deal with repairs, and they judge that manager almost entirely by what they hear back.

The most common complaint from owners in that position is not that something went wrong. It is that they never quite know what is going on.

What owners actually want to know

Every month, roughly the same five things:

1. Did the rent come in? For each property, for the month.
2. What was spent, and on what? Repairs, common charges, cleaning, fees, with the invoice behind each one.
3. What is owed? Arrears from tenants, and anything the owner needs to pay.
4. What is coming up? A lease ending, an annual rent adjustment, an insurance renewal, a planned repair.
5. What is left for me? The net amount, and when it will be transferred.

Nothing on that list is complicated. It is just rarely in one place.

Why statements are late and incomplete

For a manager, producing that statement usually means opening the bank account, the rent spreadsheet, the repairs folder and the email inbox, and reconciling them property by property. With a few properties that is an evening. With fifty it is days, so statements go out late, quarterly, or only when an owner asks — which is exactly when the owner has already started to worry.

A statement that writes itself

The statement should be a view of records that already exist, not a document someone assembles:

• Rent due comes from the lease, and rent received is recorded against it, so arrears are a calculation, not a discovery.
• Expenses are attached to the property — and to the maintenance ticket that caused them — when the invoice arrives.
• Dates — lease end, rent adjustment — are stored once and flagged in advance.

That is how the property management system we built works: properties, owners, tenants and leases; rent schedules generated from the lease; expected against received, with arrears; indexation applied automatically; maintenance tickets tied to expenses; and occupancy, revenue and expiring-lease alerts. The monthly numbers for each owner come out of the same records the manager already keeps. We wrote about the maintenance half of that in maintenance requests that arrive at midnight.

Property management firmRents, arrears and maintenance for a rental portfolio

Small things owners notice

• Send it on the same day every month. Predictability builds trust faster than detail.
• Write it in the owner's language. A Greek-Australian owner may read English more comfortably than Greek; a German buyer certainly will.
• Attach the invoices, or link to them. "Plumber, €180" with no invoice is a question waiting to be asked.
• Explain anything unusual in one sentence. "Rent paid late this month; tenant has confirmed, fully paid on the 14th."

The honest version

A manager with three properties and owners who are family can do this with a spreadsheet and a good habit. A manager with dozens of properties, and owners spread across three countries, is running a reporting business on top of a property business. Let's talk about making the first one automatic.