Mark A.
4/5
Overall, the Rent Right team did very good work in managing our rental home in Prescott for three years. My wife and I lived in New York City and in Phoenix during this time. Initially, every employee we spoke with on the phone was competent in their roles, resourceful, courteous, and demonstrated good problem solving, follow-up, and communications skills. Your processes seemed sound and resulted in customer satisfaction. However, after a while, a few employees exhibited less than the highest level of competency in these areas. Also, overall there is room for improvement in three specific areas.
Rent Right was consistently excellent in selecting tenants for our home and making the process for landlords convenient and simple. You were also consistently excellent in managing the rental home, including cleaning up after tenants vacated.
Opportunities for improvement can be made in the high cost of repairs, lack of timely notifications about property problems, and lack of qualified contractors to perform repairs. Your costs for repairs and replacements are excessive, notwithstanding your added 10% fee to contractors' estimates. You can do better in screening contractors for reasonable prices. An example was after a tenant moved out, you told us about a landscaper's quote of $1800 to clean the front and back yards. I found one who performed the same scope of work for only $300.
Your team did a wonderful job in documenting the condition of our home after a tenant vacates. This includes taking making interior and exterior photos of the home and posting them on the owners portal with notes about and remediation that may need to be done. However, you don't explain this process in advance to owners. For example, about two months before the end of a lease, a team of two took almost 100 photos of a home and posted them on the owners portal with notes about roof leaks in a bedroom and garage. We didn't know they were there or that there was a problem. Two months later, we received a call from rent Right asking what we wanted to do about the leaks. That was the first communication of a problem to us. Your process needs to be revised with a follow-up scheduled any time a problem is communicated and an owner doesn't respond timely.
Finally, in the course of fixing these same roof leaks, we discovered Rent Right does not sufficiently qualify all of its contractors. Your solution to the roof leaks was to send us quotes from three roofing contractors. They ranged in scope from a simple inspection to a full roof replacement. Naturally, the variation in cost was large, about $20,000. Also, none of the roofers could fix all of the leaks because they either specialized in shingle or flat roofs only but not both. I told Rent Right I would do the research and hoped to identify a roofer who could competently perform an investigation and perform the remediation at a reasonable price. I contacted five roofers who were able to work on both flat and shingle roofs. I selected three for quotes and from them selected one to do the work. After the project was done, Rent Right added that roofing company to its list of contractors. That work should have been done already without the assistance of an owner, even though you give owners the option of securing their own contractors for needed work.