Tips for Handling Tenant Complaints

As hard as you try to keep all of your tenants happy as a landlord, receiving complaints from your tenants is still almost unavoidable. However, handling complaints that you may receive from your tenants doesn’t have to be as intense as some people make it out to be. As property managers in Redding who have over twenty years of experience managing properties all over Shasta County, we would love to help you handle your tenants’ complaints with ease by offering you some of our best advice in the manner.

1. Listen – if one of your tenants has a complaint, regardless of what your input or opinion is on the matter, make it your top priority to listen to and understand what your tenant is experiencing. If your tenant doesn’t feel heard, known, or respected, there is a high chance that the complaint can blow up into a conflict quickly. If you want to prevent a huge conflict, make it a priority to approach your tenant with respect.

2. Be available and responsive – if your tenant has a complaint, but does not feel like you are available or care to respond to their complaint, that will leave room for conflict. Your tenant will lose respect for you as a landlord and that can damage your relationship with that tenant. Be available and responsive during 9:00AM-5:00AM work hours. However, it is definitely ok to set some boundaries with your tenants. If your tenants are continually trying to contact you after work hours or late at night, you are not necessarily responsible to respond to them during that time unless it could be an emergency. Be sure to know what would be considered an emergency and what would not be considered an emergency so that you can decide whether it is necessary to respond or to set a boundary in those moments.

3. Stay professional – when one of your tenant is upset and emotional about something, the worst thing that you can do as a landlord is to emotionally react to their complaint. For example, if your tenant is expressing their frustration by yelling at you, the worst thing that you can do is yell back. That will only communicate that you don’t respect him or her and that you aren’t concerned about his or her complaint. Remain professional by detaching from your emotions and seeking to understand.

4. Resolve the matter in a timely manner – depending on how pressing the issue is with your tenant, do your best to prioritize resolving the issue as quickly as possible. If you can’t resolve the matter right away, be sure to communicate to your tenant how much of a priority it is to you to resolve it.

If you would like more information on how you can best handle your tenants’ complaints, or if you would like to hire a property manager to handle those issues for you, feel free to give us a call at Authority Property Management! We do property management in Redding and Shasta County and would love to help you in any way that we can. Feel free to call us at (530) 410-6085.