Bank Holidays

When we are employed we all love the thought of a long weekend! Time to relax and spend time doing the things we love. However, when you are self employed or a landlord the reality is somewhat different. As we all know as a freelancer when we don't work we don't get paid and as a specialist property virtual assistant you can almost guarantee things go wrong out of hours and often during long weekends!

When supporting small landlords they also want time to relax and this is where I often step in and provide emergency support. I also choose to work on more complicated things that need time to complete without numerous other distractions, when nobody else expects me to work. 

I can often be found working quietly at weekends. Recently, I have reorganised all of one client's folders and for another worked on a property launch, and I can often be found updating tenant enquiries for another ready to follow up on a Monday, as well as doing all my own admin to keep my business running. All done with coffee, the radio and minimal distractions and after I have done my own shopping. (I learnt the hard way when an emergency occurred and I didn't manage to leave the house that day)!

​With the second bank holiday weekend in quick succession I settled down to get on with the work. My plan included covering a client's team member who usually covers our serviced accommodation and a property launch. 

No problem a couple of hours and I will be finished or so I thought, followed by the afternoon to keep an eye on any guest messages and respond from the comfort of my living room, which is how I usually cover weekends. But as we all know when working in property everything can be calm and going along as planned and then all hell breaks loose (or it can feel like it)! Things always go wrong in threes and I can honestly say this is regardless of industry or profession. Boilers always break in threes like cardiac arrests always come in 3's. Two extremes but totally true and I have seen both. 

Literally it did go from calm to chaos in the space of a few minutes, when I received a call asking for support from a team member, regarding a serious situation. I dropped the launch and started helping them to firefight the situation and gave my complete attention to assisting them to sort out the matter. We worked to resolve it and I continued with the launch. Then we found we were getting technical issues on some of our software, which was causing booking issues, so again while not an emergency something urgent to attend to. By the time I finally finished working I had spent 6.5 hours working!

The moral of the story is property is unpredictable and flexibility is the key to supporting landlords to run their property portfolios. Yes, we would all love that any issues occur Monday to Friday during normal working hours, but the reality is they don't and sometimes I am required to work outside the hours that I do offer. As a freelancer I can commit to working or take the weekend off as the clients need me to. Note to self next time we are moving students in on a Sunday set the alarm clock early ready to provide support to the landlord!

This weekend I am covering as operational support for all their portfolio while they have a much deserved weekend off. 

#landlords #rentals #serviced accommodation #tenants #propertymanagement