Should you contact property management in Charleston, SC or go straight to the online listings?
We get many inquiries from tenants asking if we have an appropriate property for their needs. This begs the question, should you do this work yourself by surfing Zillow, Rent.com, Apartments.com etc or should you simply contact property management in Charleston first?
The short answer is that it doesn’t really matter. Most of what is available and is managed by property management companies is already listed for rent online. Certainly if you have good property management in Charleston, they would have listed all their available units as soon as they were able to.
Property managers are incentivized to meet the needs of the property owners because that’s how they get paid. Implicit however is the need within the property owner/property management relationship to attract and retain great tenants. So yes, owners pay the companies but owners don’t continue paying property management companies if they are not getting what they need accomplished.
Property managers enjoy getting inquiries from potential tenants
In that sense, yes when you are looking for a residence, it is a great idea to reach out to the best property management in Charleston you can find. But if you just do that, I think you aren’t doing enough.
Think of it like this… you want candy but don’t really care which kind it is. At the same time, you want to be able to consider ALL the candy available. Do you just reach out to Hershey’s and wait for them to get back to you explaining what chocolate bars you can buy? No, you go online and search for ‘candy for sale’ in your desired area. Now you can see ALL the candy and not just be steered towards chocolate!
We recommend that renters when beginning a new search pick half a dozen property managers and reach out providing the details of what they are looking for. This kind of attitude is desired because it’s proactive. Once you’ve established those connections, then do your own searching on Zillow and the other sites referenced above.