My Tenants Speak a Different Language

You can imagine what a hassle this can be when rent is late or maintenance needs to be performed. I do have a Spanish speaking maintenance man on staff and for years I relied heavily on him to take maintenance calls and collect rent from our Spanish speaking tenants. Most of the time he performed pretty well...or so I thought. Slowly I started hearing complaints about deferred maintenance. I routinely drive through my rental neighborhood and would stop and look around the homes. Often the children of my tenants (They do speak English) would tell me that they had not been able to get in touch with us to have repairs made. I began to realize that  I had put my maintenance man in a position that he was just not very good at handling. I also realized that I needed a better solution.

I was discussing this issue with my business coach one day (More on him in another post) and he came up with the most simple idea. "Surely, he offered, there is an answering service that could handle Spanish speaking callers. Let’s look into it." So that's exactly what I did. It took me all of 5 minutes to find a service that offered multiple languages, charged a low rate based on call volume and followed my exact instructions on how to handle these calls. By the way, they also answer calls 24/7 and answer the phone “Thank you for calling Clutch Investments, How may I help you?”. Hell, I don’t even answer that professionally! I was off and running. The calls are translated and sent to me via text message. I am then able to send the appropriate vendor and follow up to ensure satisfaction.

It’s important to remember that happy tenants stay around longer, improving returns and simplifying life for me and my investors. YAY!