Movement, water and the ground floor are what your feed has to explain

Doors that stick and floors that slope are the first thing an owner asks about

Houses here move because the ground under them moves, and every owner of a raised house has noticed something and told nobody.

A raised house on piers sits over a high water table on ground that settles unevenly. A door that binds in summer and swings in winter, a hallway with a slope you can feel, a gap opening above a window frame. Ordinary here, and alarming to somebody who learned about houses in a state where everything sits on a slab.

Make the video about the door rather than about the foundation. Show a door planed and rehung in a Bywater double, say why it moved, and say that it will probably move again. A planed door is the repair a tenant reported last month, so it is the one owners recognize.

Then give them the ladder. Which movement your maintenance team handles, which goes to a foundation contractor, which needs an engineer before anybody writes a quote. An owner who understands the order stops treating every sticking door as an emergency and stops ignoring the one that matters.

Drainage belongs in the same conversation. Where water leaves a yard, whether a downspout is aimed at a pier, what the ground does under a raised house after a long wet week. Your team already looks at all of it during an inspection, so the footage costs one extra minute on a visit somebody was making anyway.

An exterior repair on a protected building waits, and the empty unit waits with it

In the older parts of the city what may change on a visible elevation goes through review, and an owner who does not know that will blame you for the calendar.

Windows, doors, siding, galleries and paint on a front elevation are reviewed in the protected districts, and the practice is not the same from one district to the next. An owner in the Garden District and an owner in Lakeview are not in the same process at all.

The cost owners feel is time. A unit that cannot be turned until exterior work is finished sits empty through the wait, and nobody warned them about that at signing. Say it out loud in advance, because owners forgive a delay they were told about and never forgive one they discovered.

Publish the sequence your firm follows. When you flag that a repair will need review, what you can get done inside while the outside waits, how you keep a unit marketable in the meantime, and who does the paperwork.

The footage is unusual and worth having. A gallery rebuilt to match, a sash repaired rather than replaced, a Creole cottage front that came back without changing. Owners in the Marigny and Treme have been told for years that nothing can be done to an old house, and evidence beats reassurance.

A street here fills in twenty minutes and empties on a pump

The city drains upward rather than downhill, which makes a heavy afternoon in July a property event on an ordinary week instead of a storm event on a named one.

Water does not run off low ground, it gets lifted out. A hard afternoon over Mid-City or Gentilly can put water in the street before the rain has stopped, and take it away again by evening with nothing about it on the news.

The loss is almost never the house. A raised living floor stays dry while everything at ground level takes it: a car at the curb, a washer and dryer under the house, boxes in a ground floor storage room, a water heater somebody put where it was convenient. Owners buy a raised house believing it is safe from water and rarely think about the part underneath it.

So the instruction worth publishing is about the car and the ground floor, and it has to name blocks. Which corners hold water is knowledge your techs have and a tenant who moved here in March does not, and a car moved to higher ground before the pumps catch up is a claim nobody has to open.

Say in the lease and again in public what may be kept under a raised house. Anything valuable stored at ground level is stored in the part of the property the drainage protects least, and that is a better conversation to have in February than in the middle of a wet August.

Catch basins are the small version of the same problem. One blocked basin floods a driveway nothing else would have touched, and photographing them during a routine inspection is a two second habit that explains a great many bills later.

The nightly rate is the competition for every door you manage

Owners here are choosing between a lease and a nightly listing, and the choice decides whether the door is on your rent roll at all.

In some neighborhoods the alternative use is more visible than the rental market. An owner with a double in the Marigny has watched the block change around them and wants a reason to sign a year lease instead.

Answer from your own operation. What a furnished turn takes in labor, what insurance asks for, what a storm in the middle of a booked season does to the model, and what a long term lease gives an owner who does not want to run a small hotel.

Stay on your own ground. What long term management involves is something you can describe completely, and permitting is not, since it differs by parish and neighborhood and it changes.

The comparison brings the right reader. Somebody weighing the two models is deciding what to do with a property this month, which is exactly the conversation a management firm wants to be standing in.

The parts that are the same in any market, like what to do with a post that travels and how to judge the channel over a year, sit on our property management social media page at /industries/property-management/social-media.