Property Management Assistant

Property management is a volume business in administration. A manager with a dozen buildings is fielding tenant requests, vendor scheduling and owner questions all day, and the reporting slips because the phone keeps ringing. This role takes the recurring half.

• Tenant request intake. Logging maintenance requests, dispatching the right vendor, and closing the loop with the tenant so nothing sits unacknowledged.
• Vendor coordination. Scheduling work, chasing certificates of insurance before anyone is on site, and matching invoices to work orders.
• Lease administration. Keeping critical dates current: renewals, options, escalations, and expirations.
• Rent collection support. Tracking what landed, issuing the standard reminders, and escalating genuine delinquencies to the manager.
• Owner reporting. Assembling the monthly package from the accounting system so the manager reviews rather than builds it.
• Compliance tracking. Inspections, certificates and recurring service records, with a diary so nothing lapses.

Scale Partner is the employer of record, and one assistant serves one client at a time. See how a placement works.

This role lives inside the property management platform, and most of the day is spent in two or three screens of it.

• Property management platforms. Yardi most often, then MRI, AppFolio or RealPage depending on the portfolio.
• Accounts payable and invoice automation. Nexus, Avid or the platform's own module, where invoices are matched to work orders and approvals are routed.
• Work orders and maintenance. The platform's module, or a dedicated tool where the firm uses one.
• Spreadsheets. Excel for the owner package, the variance report and the CAM workings.
• Documents. SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox for leases, certificates of insurance and inspection records.
• Communication. Outlook or Gmail for tenant and vendor correspondence, Teams or Slack internally.

Training on your specific configuration happens before the first day, not during your first close.

Property administration runs on the accounting calendar. The tenant requests arrive at random, the reporting does not, and the role is mostly about protecting the second from the first.

The monthly close. Tenant billings, accruals and reclasses, aged receivables, and the variance report explaining where actual spend departed from budget. Sales reports get collected from tenants whose leases require them, which in practice means chasing the ones who do not send them. The close date does not move to accommodate it.

The quarterly reforecast and the annual budget. Both are assembly jobs before they are analysis jobs: pulling actuals, gathering vendor pricing, and getting the operating numbers into a reviewable state. The annual budget is the heaviest recurring stretch in the year.

CAM reconciliation. Determining recoverable expenses, reconciling them against what was billed, and producing the statements tenants will read closely. Anything wrong here is disputed by a tenant with the lease open in front of them, so it gets checked against the lease language rather than against last year's file.

Vendor and compliance administration. Certificates of insurance collected before anyone is on site, work orders opened and closed rather than left open, service agreements tracked to renewal, and inspection records kept current. Most of this is a diary problem.

Recurring pressure points. Month end, the CAM reconciliation run, and budget season. Tenant escalations arrive on top of all three and do not wait, which is the tension the role exists to absorb.

Screen for follow-through under interruption. This role is a queue of small things, any one of which becomes a real problem if it is dropped.

• Triage across urgency. Give them four tenant requests including a water leak and a lightbulb. Ask the order and the response time on each.
• Tone under pressure. Have them draft a reply to a tenant on their third email about the same unresolved issue. Firm, specific, and no defensiveness.
• Vendor persistence. Ask how they get a certificate of insurance out of a contractor who has ignored two requests and is scheduled on site tomorrow.
• Date discipline. Ask how they track lease options and renewals. Listen for a system with a lead time built in.
• Knowing when to escalate. Ask what they would handle themselves and what goes straight to the manager. A candidate who escalates nothing is as much a risk as one who escalates everything.

Scale Partner weights follow-through under interruption most heavily when screening for this role. The FAQ covers the replacement guarantee.

The boundary protects the manager's license and the owner's position.

• They do not approve expenditure beyond whatever standing threshold the client sets.
• They do not negotiate leases or renewals. That sits with the manager or a lease administrator.
• They do not make habitability or safety calls. Anything with a life-safety dimension goes to the manager immediately.
• They do not serve notices or handle eviction proceedings.
• They do not sign vendor contracts or bind the owner.

Tenant requests do not respect one time zone, and an unacknowledged request on a Friday afternoon becomes an angry call on Monday.

A dedicated assistant means intake and acknowledgement happen on a predictable schedule, and the reporting still lands on the close date in the weeks when requests spike. Continuity carries more weight here than on most roles, because the same tenants and the same vendors deal with the same person month after month.