How Often Should Property Managers Communicate with Owners? A Smarter Investor’s Guide
One of the most common—and important—questions rental property investors ask is: “How often will I hear from my property manager?” And while the answer varies depending on what’s happening at your property, the real insight is in the quality, timing, and transparency of that communication—not just frequency.
At Red Door Property Management, our communication model is built to be proactive, responsive, and investor-friendly. Here's what that really looks like.
Communication That Aligns With the Rental Lifecycle
Instead of vague promises or “call us when you need us” policies, we align our communication with every critical phase of your property's lifecycle:
- Onboarding: High-touch communication starts immediately. We review your New Owner Info Sheet, complete a market readiness assessment, and walk you through your AppFolio portal setup. Expect email, phone, and even text updates depending on your preferred style.
- Vacancy & Marketing: Every week, we send video updates to keep you informed on showings, applications, and market feedback. These updates include clear recommendations on pricing or property condition adjustments if needed.
- Occupied Phase: Once leased, communication naturally decreases—because no news is often good news. But you’ll still get updates from inspections (3 months after move-in and annually thereafter), transparent maintenance alerts, and monthly statements.
- Lease Renewals: Communication ramps up again 90–100 days before renewal. We send market comps, renewal strategies, and perform another inspection to ensure long-term success.
This structure allows us to reduce owner stress and increase ROI—because you’re always in the loop without having to chase down updates.
Proactive Communication, Not Reactive Excuses
We’ve seen the damage poor communication causes: missed maintenance approvals, tenant issues that spiral, or surprise vacancies due to unresolved concerns. At Red Door, we aim to eliminate those blind spots before they become problems.
Our systems are designed to notify you early, provide photo documentation, and offer quick access to all your property’s data. We prefer to overcommunicate on the front end to avoid reactive fire drills on the back end.
Want to know how it feels to be in control of your rental investment? Explore the Red Door Property Management difference and see why so many owners trust our team with their Indianapolis rentals.
Communication Tools That Drive Owner Confidence
Through tools like AppFolio and Property Meld, you’ll have real-time access to:
- Before & after photos on all maintenance work
- Monthly and annual financial reports
- Communication logs and status updates
- Maintenance approvals and cost transparency
Everything is documented. Everything is visible. That’s how modern property management should work.
So… How Often Do We Talk to Owners?
For most of our properties—if things are going well—you’ll hear from us a few key times per year, including inspections, renewals, or any urgent issues. During onboarding, vacancy, or if challenges arise, you’ll hear from us frequently, and always with clarity and options.
Bottom line: we don’t flood your inbox with unnecessary noise—but we’re always there when it matters most.
Ready to work with a property manager who treats communication like the foundation of your success? See how we manage Indianapolis rentals the smarter way.
Transcript Here
Question of the Week: Owner Communication
I don't want to spend 45 minutes going into each and every single one of those areas. So, I would prefer to kind of keep it in a general sense. Mike, do you wanna you want to start with this and I'll kind of highlight a more intellectual point of view once you're done?
Yeah. Yeah.
I like the way you put that, Chris.
Thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, let's then jump into this month's question of the week. So this one is brought to you from Sarah. And so here we go. So the question we received was, “So how often do you guys actually talk to the property owners?” Now, this can open us up to a tremendous amount of conversation because we really dive down into the details when we are talking about how we communicate with our property owners. So it’s really at what stage of the life cycle are we in? Are we on the front end? Are we in the middle? Are we at the end? So I don’t want to spend 45 minutes going into each and every single one of those areas. So I would prefer to kind of keep it in a general sense, but while also communicating the technical and detailed aspects in which we do communicate with our owners.
Mike, do you want to start with this and I’ll kind of highlight a more intellectual point of view once you’re done?
I like the way you put that, Chris.
Thank you. Thank you.
I will say I think this is a good time for a self-promotion plug too. We just—we’re revamping some of our website and is the communication one— is that one live yet or is it about to—
No, that’s—I’m so glad you mentioned that. I almost forgot. So, the communications page is what we are working on right now. Hopefully in the next week or so, we’ll have that live. But since you already brought up the pillar pages, listen, you got to check out our website. It’s absolutely phenomenal. If you want to know how we do business, it’s all there. Video content so that you don’t have to read every single word, but there’s also words there in case you like to read.
Yeah. So, anyway, check out the communication page coming up in what, couple days, right?
Yeah. I’d say probably about a week, week or so.
Okay. So, like you said, we could spend 45 minutes talking about how we communicate with owners and go into a great level of detail, but I think at a very high level, I think it does make sense to kind of go through the whole life cycle of a tenant, I guess, or of a property.
I mean, at the beginning of a property, we’re going to onboard it. There’s going to be a ton of communication with our owners, right? Because that’s when we’re getting to know each other. That’s when we’re getting to know the property. If there’s a tenant involved, what’s going on there? What’s going on with the property? I don’t know where to stop because we do a market readiness assessment. Do we want to go into that? Do we want to go into the onboarding call? I mean, we do so much. I guess I just—I don’t know how to make not a 45-minute conversation.
Exactly. Exactly.
It’s very tough for me to avoid that, too. So, here we go. Our communication starts on the front end. We’re very detail oriented. And if you’re not working with a property management company that’s also extremely detail-oriented—because it’s extremely important and efficient operation—then you should be finding somebody else.
So it’s on the front end where we are obtaining the specific information from the owner. You’re going to fill out a very detailed new owner info sheet, provide us all the details of the property. That’s your communication that you’re sharing with us. And then it talks about how we communicate with you going forward. And that, like Mike alluded to, it’s pretty heavy on the front end to narrow down those details. And that’s going to be through email communication, text communication when necessary—which I’ve had a lot of conversations recently where that’s extremely important to owners. You’re hearing a lot more of that. Maybe that’s Gen Z coming up. They really are hammering home the necessity for that text communication.
But what platforms are you going to have that you’re going to be communicated with? This is where I think is really the important part. The communication platforms—maintenance—where on the front end when we’re completing that market readiness assessment, it’s all going to start being shared with you through your property account. This is your maintenance software that you’re going to use. Check us out. Check out our maintenance pillar page on our website where you can see exactly what it’s like from the owner perspective on viewing and communicating maintenance approvals and communication. And that will start with our market readiness assessment protocol.
Then it goes into other communications, which is going to be your monthly statements, your ability to run a multitude of monthly reports all at the click of a button through your own owner portal, and this is provided to you through AppFolio. It’s amazing and you’ll be able to see exactly what your owner experience is like on the communications page that we’re building right now, which will show you exactly what your owner portal experience through AppFolio will be like. It’s all super transparent. It is before and after photos of maintenance requests. It is transparency when it comes to invoices.
But as far as our means of communication, it’s really through any and all forms: text, phone call, and email. Now I will, in pure transparency, I put as much as I possibly can in writing for not only my benefit but also the owner’s benefit. I try to cover just about everything: how we do it, what the communication platforms are, and so on. Go ahead.
Maybe a couple things to add to that. One thing I think that’s important to highlight is during vacancy. That’s a really important time, a really stressful time for our owners. So we really try to make sure that the lines of communication are open. One thing I think that we do that’s a little bit different than everyone else is we do a weekly video update to our owners going over the activity of their property. Good, bad, or ugly, we tell them how many showings we had, how many applications we had, what the feedback was. Proactive—trying to be proactive—making recommendations whether that’s condition or price or, hey, we got it just right, I think we just need to wait a week.
The communication is really heavy on the initial part as well as during the marketing stage because it’s so important that we work together as a team—the owner and the property management company—to get this leased up as quickly as possible. That requires constant communication, constant feedback from us, and feedback from the owners. So that’s one thing I definitely wanted to highlight: the weekly owner updates during the vacancy stage.
Yeah. And as we rattle through this—at least myself—rattle through so many different things in such a short amount of time, it’s because I don’t want this to be a 45-minute explanation on how we communicate. It may sound a bit overwhelming at first, but it’s important to understand what good communication really looks like. And what that looks like is proactive communication rather than reactive communication. And that’s exactly where we try to focus from day one.
That’s the point I was trying to make from that initial obtaining the initial property details on the front end and communication through the market readiness assessment. This is all proactive communication so that we’re not reacting once we place that tenant. And in the means of communication that we use, it varies, but it all is through a platform that makes it extremely easy for the owner to be notified and respond so that we can make decisions together to increase your overall ROI.
Yeah, 100%. Onboarding, vacancy is so important as you’ve already mentioned. Maintenance is so important. Like you said, we do use a system called PropertyMeld. We like it because it allows us to easily communicate with our owners through email, text, also share before and after photos, share estimates. That’s a really great communication tool for us that opens up the transparency around maintenance, which is so important.
Let me put you on the spot for three seconds here. Can you think of a way that poor communication from maybe another property manager might affect an owner in any way?
I can think of several. Do you want me to start?
Yeah, go for it.
Okay. Yeah, you look nervous. So, one way is—this is going to relate to the bonehead that we’re going to get into here in just a minute—and that is where you’re not effectively communicating a maintenance situation. That means timely response, which everyone knows—or if you’re tuned into the podcast you certainly know now—maintenance responses directly will affect your tenant retention. So it’s not getting that timely response. It’s not getting that transparent communication, which could potentially include before photos so that you can make an effective decision. And then obtaining that estimate within a reasonable amount of time so you can make that decision quickly. That’s one—by not providing that transparency and not providing that quick communication from a maintenance request.
Yeah, 100%. There’s a million examples. One would just be not communicating quickly enough. If you’ve got a tenant situation that’s escalating, you’ve got to know when to reach out to the owner and let them know when these things are spiraling out of control. It’s our job as property managers to deal with this so the owners don’t have to, but you need to have the wherewithal to know when to reach out to the owner to say, “Hey, this is a potential issue that’s coming up.”
If you don’t do that, then potentially you’ve got somebody who all of a sudden wants to move out—or maybe they’ve moved out early—due to whatever, maybe a maintenance concern or something, some disgruntled tenant. You blindside the owner and say, “Oh hey, yeah, by the way, your house is vacant.” They weren’t brought up to speed the whole time, knowing, hey, we got a situation, we’re trying to work through it. It’s so important.
Yeah, absolutely. And I want to go back to the original question here to wrap this up, and that was: how often do you actually talk to your property owners?
Good point. Let’s actually answer the question.
Yeah, exactly. And that is—honestly, if things are going well, I would say with probably 85% of the properties under our management, it doesn’t need to be that often. Honestly. It’s me reaching out, our general manager reaching out, or even Mike reaching out to check the pulse on how everything’s going with the owner. Everything’s going pretty smooth, and that’s the result of being proactive.
There’s not a lot of things happening on the property maintenance-wise. It’s about completing that inspection, then sharing that inspection which is completed three months into a new lease and then on an annual basis thereafter. So it’s a couple touches maybe a year just to check the pulse. And then of course when those situations arise, it becomes a lot more active communication. Both sides are good, honestly. You don’t want to hear from your property manager sometimes, and then when you need to, you really want to hear from your property manager.
Well, let me just sum it up. I think I’ve finally been able to summarize it at a very high level. At the very beginning—during the onboarding process and during the marketing phase—there’s going to be lots and lots of communication between us and the owners. Lots and lots. There needs to be a ton of communication.
Then there will be the move-in. There’ll be a little bit more communication around the accounting. Somebody moved in, we’ll do an inspection—so a little bit more communication. Then there’s honestly, assuming there’s no maintenance, a little bit of a lull. Then we re-engage back at about three months. We’ll do an inspection and we will share that with our owners. That’s a shared video, a shared inspection, so a little bit of communication there.
Then again, assuming no maintenance issues, there is again a little bit of a lull until we start to think about the lease renewal. We start thinking about the lease renewal about 90 to 100 days ahead of time. That’s where we start to re-engage the owner again: pull some comps, talk about the lease renewal, do another inspection. Communication spurs up again. Then either there’s a move-out or the lease renews, and then the cycle continues.
That’s a beautiful way to sum it up.
Yeah, because ultimately you just answered the question, and I just found ways to talk about our platforms and stuff there on the front end. So there’s a full answer from zero to 100 for sure.
Now, if you’re catching this, check out our communications page on our website. Let me know if you feel like it is informative or if there’s other areas where you think, hey, this specific question isn’t really answered in your communications page. We’re really proud of those pillar pages we’re putting up. We really feel like it provides a tremendous amount of transparency on the front end before you even have to pick up the phone and call Red Door and talk to me—although I’m really fun to talk to. So don’t hesitate to do that.
Check out the pillar pages. I would love to hear some feedback on what you think about how those are going up and the information they provide.
All right, that’s going to wrap up our question of the week for “How often do we actually talk to our owners?” I hope you found that extremely helpful. And now we’re going to dive into the bonehead.
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