Three funny tales from a property manager

Funny tales. When our founder was a little girl frequenting the Doctors on a regular basis, (anything to bunk off school) and before the smartphone was invented, her enduring memory was reading a crusty old edition of the Reader’s Digest in the waiting room. For those of who weren’t lucky enough to know what this is or old enough, and believe us when we say that was all of our office, this was a general interest family and lifestyle magazine that was printed monthly.

This included a section entitled laughter is the best medicine, which focused on funny stories or jokes which we can only assume was meant to balance out the more serious articles in the rest of the magazine.

This attempt to lighten the tone, recently came to mind when one of our clients asked

“How and why did anyone want to do our job?”

After some consideration and to be honest a bit of a struggle with an answer, we finally came up with a reason – property management can be fun and this blog will center around some vignettes of experiences that have happened to all of us.

Medicinal purposes…obviously

We start with the most recent one, our client who had recently purchased their freehold has been keen for the remaining non-participants to buy in to this.

It just so happens that aside from this property, the client owns a farm (for those of you who follow our Instagram posts you will have seen Hetty and Ingrid) and so you can imagine our amusement when we were advised that the non-participant had asked whether an arrangement could be reached for their Share of Freehold, involving the growing of plants, for medicinal purposes obviously, on the client’s farm. As you can imagine, our client refused but not after being offered plastic surgery as an alternative. It certainly made a very grey sky, a blue one for all us in the office.

Masks and other paraphernalia

Speaking of blue, I think that this is what we felt when we once attended a flat with a contractor to view a leak. We couldn’t understand why, when they were obviously there to find the leak, they seemed more interested in us entering first.

On this occasion it wasn’t a case of a bucket being on the top of the door, that was causing their bemusement, more that we had no clue what we were about to experience – needless to say the flat was not owned by an actor, and we can only assume the masks and paraphernalia in the flat were for another profession.

This was emphasised when we seemed to pass the owner’s next appointment on the stairs, looking somewhat discomfited. We understood why they were keen to get us out as soon as possible and why the door closed swiftly behind us. This definitely brightened up the day of the property manager and also the mood in the office- I think most of us ended up with bright red faces, particularly when our founder had to explain what was going on to one of our more naïve members of staff.

The last person to take the keys were……

We are frequently asked to get involved with issues between flats, including when couples may get a bit carried away when they are being over amorous but perhaps one of the most odd experiences we had was when we were accused of having accessed a flat using keys that we held for that purpose.

Again, we had been asked to deal with a leak with the owner asking us to provide keys to the contractor for a quote. All seemed fine until we received a call a few weeks later advising that things had gone missing from their flat. When we tried to find out what they were missing it, the owner went quiet.

After some persuasion, we were finally able to ascertain that various pieces of underwear had gone missing and they thought someone had rifled through their underwear drawer. We were a little unsure how to tell the owner, that the last person to take their keys was their spouse as they had been locked away in our secured key cabinet. When we finally did, the owner seemed to want to get us off the phone as quickly as possible.

There are so many stories that we could share from property management and if we had enough time, we’d write a book as it is true, there is nothing as queer as folk. However, at this time it will be something for our founder’s retirement as we are too busy making our clients happy and hopefully laugh.

It is true that property management is tough and can be very unrewarding, but for the team at MIH, we are able to find levity throughout our working day and that keeps us going. For those moments that are difficult, we can always rely on each other to keep us chuckling

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