Carrie was the first property manager we ever worked with. We had nothing but problems working with…read moreher. She was inconsistent, flaky, uncooperative, and overall just very indifferent towards us, our renters and our home. She did not serve in our best interest when managing our home.
The first set of tenants signed a traditional 12 month lease. However, Carrie drew up a lease for our second set of tenants for 6 months, going month to month afterwards, and then told the tenants that we wanted them out after the 6 months was up. We were never made aware of this, did not request that at all, and did not even receive a copy of the lease agreement until we fired her in May. We threatened to go after her for being in breach of her contract in order to obtain the necessary documents to move forward with a new company. We only found out today July 26th, that the tenants were moving out of our house, after they gave us no notice at all. Carrie told them they did not have to provide any kind of notice since we knew that they were supposed to be out of the house by the end of the month and we didn't know anything about this until the new property management company called me while I was on my way to pick up my son from the sitter after work. Carrie never performed a single inspection on our property in the 15 months she managed it. She did video walkthroughs of the property but never had either set of tenants sign any kind of documentation and never provided us with any kind of report or copy of one.
I did not even know who the tenants were and had to pull two of the three names off of a cashflow worksheet and threaten to message them via social media just to obtain their names and contact info. She would ignore me until I threatened her like this several times during the month of May after we gave her our 30 day notice. We had an online portal that were were supposed to be able to access all documents and tenant information when necessary, but there was nothing in our monthly statements except the generic cash flow worksheets. I know now-- having a different property management company that uses Appfolio-- how much information we were missing now that I have a comparison of what these statements are supposed to look like. Carrie did a poor job of communicating with us about anything going on with our home.
I informed her when we hired her that we had never rented out our home before and needed transparency in regards to what was going on, especially since we were not physically in the state of AK. However, Carrie would tell us that something broke, and then wouldn't follow up with us and let us know if it ever got fixed. Sometimes things would be fixed immediately and other times it would be weeks or months later. One maintenance request we submitted to her upon hire did not get addressed until May and sat broken for 15 months. We had to have things fixed multiple times, she would hire handymen to do work for "discounted" rates but then things were constantly breaking. We were being charged for maintenance requests from having a maintenance worker come to our home and show the tenants simple things like how to turn on the fireplace, or replace the batteries in the smoke detector, adjusting the closet doors, or replacing closet door knobs. Things that should have been handled in between tenants.
Often we would get no rent money or half of a rent check due to maintenance issues that we knew nothing about. The month we fired her we got $136. The month before that we got nothing at all. Out of $1600. Carrie would only communicate via text, citing it was the easiest way to contact her... but would not reply to messages for hours or days at a time. Sometimes even responding late at night or sending text messages about things that were broken over the weekend. Carrie would repeatedly forget our conversations, forget important information regarding our home, forget to contact me or the tenants, and then excuse her behavior by saying "didn't I tell you I have a concussion?" "Did I tell you I was in an accident and I'm having a hard time remembering things?" She did this on a regular basis. One time, I asked a question about something and she told me to stop texting her and to leave her alone. Then she started sending me screenshots of someone else who had been messaging her and told me that it was an accident and that her response was meant for someone else. Carrie was not only consistently bad at her job, but she always went our of her way to diminish my concerns as a homeowner and told me that I was high maintenance and expected too much from her by asking for clear communication regarding our home. Carrie is unprofessional, rude, and incompetent but makes you feel like you're a crazy person for expecting anything different. Filing a formal complaint with the BBB against her immediately, and possibly taking her to court for doing such a poor job.