Landlord Skills Assessment Tools

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How well do you handle your landlording tasks? What areas of your landlording do you think need improvement? The following Skills Assessment Tools will help you understand what goes well and what may need an upgrade in your practice.

The two simple surveys below will help you assess two basic areas of landlording: 1. Maintenance and management; and 2. Communication and conflict resolution

1. Approaches to maintenance and management

Instructions

Please review the following four (4) approaches in the left column. These are ways that landlords handle maintenance and management responsibilities.
Decide which approach best fits your current approach (whether or not you like this approach) and score yourself for that box only.

(Once you finish the second survey chart, you will be adding the total numbers together.)

Identify the term that best describes your approach to maintenance and management. Select your score.

Rows	Score yourself here:
Neglecter: You are “hands-off” when it comes to maintenance. Perhaps your rents are low and this is the trade off you make with your tenants or you just can’t afford the time or money to do repairs. You rarely focus on longer term projects or improvements Score – 0 Landlord is at serious risk; isn’t managing well, and is vulnerable to backlash. Chronic lack of adequate maintenance will cause most tenant relationships, let alone the building, to deteriorate, leading tenants to withdraw cooperation.
Delayed Responder: You understand the need to make repairs as a landlord but it is not a priority. You do get to the problems but it takes a while because you have other pressing demands Score – 1 You’re getting by but could slip backwards. This will test most tenant relationships after a while, causing them to deteriorate, leading to reduced cooperation.
Conventional Responder: You understand the need to make repairs as a landlord and respond promptly when tenants contact you about them Score - 3 You are responding appropriately. Landlord can usually maintain good relations if building is well enough maintained and landlord doesn’t slip into ‘delay’ or ‘neglect mode’
Proactive Responder: Your style is to anticipate and if possible prevent maintenance problems. You are diligent in caring for your property and take pride in how well you care for your tenants' needs Score – 4 You often take initiative handling repairs before tenant requests. This will likely build positive relationships and a cooperative spirit with tenants, and help keep the building maintained. It will lead to deposits into the “tenant relationship account”, which will be useful when you need tenant flexibility in the future.
My Total Score: Transfer this number to the TOTAL SCORING chart below.

2. Approaches to communication and conflict resolution

Instructions

Choose which communication and conflict resolution approach best matches your style, as described below. Write the score for that specific approach in the box in the second column. Write a score for only one box,
Write your score in the bottom row.
Write your total score in the appropriate box in the TOTAL SCORE chart below.

Identify the term that best describes your current approach to communication and conflict resolution. Select your score.

Rows	Score yourself here:
Avoidance: Stays away from anything resembling a conflict Score – 1 Avoiding and yielding until absolutely needing to act. Easy contact until issues arise at which point tenant can become highly adversarial such as on nonpayment issues.
Confrontational: Responds reactively by opposing the other party’s initiatives in a way that can lead to polarizing and escalating the conflict Score – 1 Positional and adversarial. Can get good compliance although tenant may be overly confrontational or positional when/if issue favors tenant.
Accommodating: Gets involved, but bends over backwards to meet the other party’s needs in order to avoid conflict Score - 1 Can maintain good tenant relationship until landlord needs to take action on nonpayment, for example, at which point tenant may be overly confrontational
Proactive, Problem solving: Focuses on your needs, your tenant's needs and how to meet them both Score – 3 Proactive, problem solving approach to communication. Can build good will and establish good relationships, and then maintain them even over issue of eviction. Can also use other three styles as may be appropriate to maximize own outcome (can be ‘appropriately adversarial’ sometimes, for example).
My Score: Transfer this number to the TOTAL SCORING chart below.

Note: You will learn more about these approaches to Communication and Conflict Resolution in An Introduction to Understanding Conflict Management Styles but first we want to take a look at the big picture that your scores represents.

Total Scoring: Looking at your overall picture

Take your scores from both assessments above and write them in the Total Scoring chart below and add them together to get your total. Circle this Score in the Interpreting your score chart where you can interpret your score.

Total Scoring

Rows	Total Score:
1. Maintenance and Management Approach My Total Score (from Assessment 1 above):
2. Communication and conflict resolution approach My Total Score (from Assessment 2 above):
My Total Score is (Transfer):

INTERPRETING YOUR SCORE

An Introduction to Conflict Management Styles

Four primary styles have been identified by conflict resolution researchers. These categories apply equally to landlords and tenants (as well as managers and workers, couples, neighbors, etc.). You might recognize yourself in each of these styles and may in fact use different styles in different circumstances or relationships. Here is a description of the major strengths and limitations of each:

Conflict Management Styles

The Avoider -- Stays away from anything resembling a conflict

Strength: peaceable
Limitation: may allow conflict to be much harder to resolve when it does surface

The Accommodator -- Gets involved, but bends over backwards to meet the other party’s needs to avoid uncomfortable conflict

Strength: peaceable and adaptive
Limitation: may be unlikely to resolve conflict when it surfaces.

The Problem Solver -- focuses on both parties’ needs and on ways to meet these needs realistically

Strength: often effective and helps maintain relationships
Limitation: may not fully deal with own feelings and needs, may keep “going around the block” of solving similar problems repeatedly

The Confronter -- responds reactively, by opposing the other party’s initiatives in a way that can lead to polarizing and escalating the conflict

Strength: powerful, dynamic and can get things done when quick decisions are vital
Limitation: may escalate conflict, and cause difficulty dealing with the full complexity of issues

These variations can be played out in a range of ways. A low-income immigrant family may buy property as a long-term strategy for financial security, but may avoid conflict due to their own cultural background, making tenant management quite difficult. A professional who is also a landlord may get satisfaction out of renting to lower-income tenants and strive to keep rents affordable but not maintain the unit adequately, leading to conflicts over code violations if dealing with nonpayment issues. In other instances, landlords and tenants may use effective problem solving skills. It is helpful to know your style but also pay attention to the style of your tenant in order to best resolve disputes.

Regardless of your style or approach, it is almost guaranteed that you will have to deal with conflict and the need to communicate as a landlord. Sometimes you will run into conflicts that are not of your own making, due to changes in law, policy or market conditions, your own personal circumstances or your tenant’s circumstances.

Dual Concerns

Another way to understand the focus of and relationship between these various approaches to conflict is to locate them on what is called a Dual Concerns Graph. The styles are compared on an axis of two concerns:

Concern about your own outcome (horizontal line) and
Concern about the other’s outcome (vertical line). Now that you know your style, try locating yourself on this graph.