20th March 2020 / Andrew Paterson: Important Notice for Landlords in response to coronavirus epidemic

In light of the current situation with respect to the coronavirus (COVID-19) and with the advice from the Australian and State Governments and World Health Organisation, Fletchers have made the following proactive decisions relating to the safety of our staff members and as our duty of care to our community.

Working Remotely

Our Property Management team will be working remotely from home with the exceptions of conducting open for inspections, final inspections and preparation of condition reports. Using cloud based systems and programs allows us the capability to continue to manage your property remotely without compromising on our service. Should you wish to contact your Property Manager, please email them or you can contact them via their direct phone line as their phone will diverted to their personal phone during business hours.

Routine Inspections

As our duty of care to our staff and Tenants all Routines Inspections were postponed until further notice from next Friday, 27th March 2020 this is an Australian wide Real Estate best practice. All tenants will be advised of the decision to postpone routine inspections and encouraged to report any maintenance through our Maintenance Manager system, which is standard practice. We will reschedule all routine inspections as soon as it is practical to do so.

Notice to Vacate

Where a tenant provides notice to vacate and should you wish to relet the property, we will commence advertising the property 21 days prior to your tenants vacate date. Prospective tenants must register for Open for Inspections and these inspections will be capped at 5 groups to allow the Agent to have control of the inspection with regards to social distancing and limiting exposure.

Vacate Inspections

Vacate inspections will be carried out 48 hours after receiving the keys from a tenant to ensure that the keys have been sanitised and the property uninhabited for a length of time. To enable us to follow this practice and allow time to conduct a vacate inspection and a condition report to be done for a new ingoing tenant, we will be allowing a minimum of 7 days between tenancies.

Rent Monies

Receiving rent and the disbursement of your monies, will continue, business as usual. Where there are individual tenant arrears issues your Property Manager will be in communication with you regarding this. Being a cloud based company allows for our Finance department to continue to manage your finances with no disruptions.

During this period of uncertainty and as this is a rapidly changing environment, we will be reassessing our practices to ensure that we try to serve the needs of our landlords, tenants, tradespeople and staff the best we can, given the current circumstances. We will advise you of changes to our practices as they evolve over the coming weeks. We will endeavour to minimise the disruptions caused by COVID-19 but prioritise the safety and wellbeing of all our clients, tenants and staff.