A Chicago management feed built out of garden units and back porches

A garden unit is leased from the gangway steps down

The unit below the sidewalk line is the hardest door on your rent roll, and the video that fills it is the one your owners will study too.

Basements are close to universal here, and in a two-flat or a greystone the lowest unit is a garden apartment with its own entrance off the gangway. It rents for less than the unit above it, it takes longer to fill, and the owner is usually the last person willing to say why.

Film it the way an applicant walks it. Down the gangway steps, through the door, past the light well, into the back room where the ceiling comes down. An honest walkthrough loses you the applicants who were going to cancel at the showing anyway.

Say what the footage cannot. Which way the windows face, how far below grade the floor sits, where the ceiling drops under a beam, whether the unit has heat of its own or shares a boiler with the building. Those questions get asked at every single showing.

Owners watch that video for a different reason. Somebody in Andersonville whose garden unit sat empty from March to July is watching to see whether anybody has finally worked out how to lease one, and that is the whole argument for hiring you.

Showings for a May first lease happen in February, in the dark

The city's lease calendar puts most move-ins at the start of May, which means the units get shown in the worst light of the year.

A unit turning on the first of May goes on the market while there is snow in the gangway and the light is gone before anybody leaves work. The apartment shows badly through no fault of the apartment.

So the listing has to say what a five o'clock showing cannot demonstrate. Which windows face south, what the front room looks like at noon, how much light reaches the back bedroom off a narrow gangway. Plain description beats a bright photograph an applicant will not recognize at the door.

Publish the calendar itself. When renewal notices go out, when photos get taken, when a unit lists, when applications close, how long between an approved application and a set of keys. Small landlords in Lakeview and Oak Park run all of that from a kitchen table, and the date they miss is the one that pushes a turn past the first of May.

Owners feel the same clock from the other end. A renewal decision made in December sets whether you are marketing that unit in February, and an owner who has watched you explain the timing answers your renewal email faster the following year.

The back porch is shared space, and it is the thing your tenants argue about

The wooden rear porch is the second exit, the storage, the grill spot and the smoking spot for every unit in the building, and the repair has been deferred.

On a two-flat or a three-flat the porch is the only piece of the building three households use at once. Bikes, a stroller, bags of salt, a grill, a tree still out there in January. It is where most tenant complaints start and where the largest maintenance bill in the building is quietly waiting.

Publish what your firm actually does about it. The seasonal walk of treads, rails and stringers, what gets cleared before the first snow, what a tenant may keep out there and what has to come inside. Tenants who have read the rule argue about it less.

Owners watching that have already had one porch conversation with a carpenter and flinched. Showing the inspection rather than the invoice is what makes a manager look like somebody who prevents bills instead of forwarding them.

Keep it descriptive rather than diagnostic. Say what you look at and what you would ask a carpenter to look at, and leave the condition of a specific structure to somebody licensed to judge it.

Somebody has to clear the walk before the block wakes up, and neighbors notice who

Snow is the one part of your service that happens in public, on a street where every household is watching.

The walk in front of a building is expected to be clear, and on a block of two-flats it is obvious by seven in the morning which buildings have somebody looking after them. A manager whose walks are done first is running the most visible advertising in the neighborhood.

Say who does it. The lease decides whether clearing falls to a tenant or to the owner, and most winter disputes start with nobody having settled that in writing. Post your version once and point at it all winter.

Parking is the other one. On a narrow street where almost nobody has a driveway, a shoveled space gets claimed with a chair and the block argues about it every February. Tenants will ask your office where it stands, so answer as a policy rather than as a side in the fight.

Freeze-thaw does the rest of the work for you. Salt on a porch tread, an ice dam over the back stair, a gangway that turns to glass overnight and has to be chipped again three days later. Owners who watch that happen on a feed understand what the winter line on their statement is buying.

The parts of this that have nothing to do with Chicago, like who belongs on camera and what deserves money behind it, we set out once on our property management social media page at /industries/property-management/social-media.