As a leasing director for the Pawtucket-based Nexus Property Management LLC since 2017, Mikalai Zhukavets is on the front lines of the residential rental market in Rhode Island, which is currently seeing a high demand for housing, as the cost of apartment living has been on the rise amid inflationary pressures.
Amid the hectic apartment market in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhukavets handles RentReliefRI applications for property owners that turn to his company to lease out units, conduct maintenance and handle any problems that come up, including evictions.
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PBN: At Nexus, you work with a lot of property owners and tenants in the rental market in Rhode Island. What is going on here with rent right now? Are a lot of owners hiking the rent due to inflation or other factors?
ZHUKAVETS: A couple of things that are most different from previous years include a recent increase in purchase prices of buildings that triggered a necessity to raise rental rates to meet the costs of new property owners. This is causing a rapid increase of monthly rent payments for many long-term tenants, who are mostly not ready or are unable to absorb that without falling behind.
Overall, long-term tenants that had not moved, or whose building did not change ownership, are seeing less-drastic increases that are mostly caused by a need to compensate for increases in taxes, utility costs and inflation.
PBN: What are the challenges you face in the property management field right now, given how hectic the sector has been recently?
ZHUKAVETS: The biggest challenge is to ensure rents are paid and being collected. It has been increasingly difficult in the past two years. Overall, tenants’ ability to pay the increased rents went down due to a number of factors, but mostly all lead to pandemic and inflation.
There is also a new phenomenon I see as of lately: many tenants who have been receiving RentReliefRI funds to cover their rent for the past 18 months have simply forgotten how to pay rent on their own and become entitled, almost openly demanding more subsidies from somewhere.
PBN: As a property manager, what’s your strategy for successfully listing and marketing apartment rentals in Rhode Island, and how do you best work with property owners on this goal?
ZHUKAVETS: The pandemic steered advertising and showings into a virtual mode mostly. Many prospects while searching for their new rental were completely satisfied with virtual showings and then completed the entire process online, including e-signing the lease and submitting an online payment for the first [month] and security. So, we also put that in our focus and intensified efforts to buffer our online presence. Nexus’ YouTube channel, corporate website and Zillow advertising were the priorities, and we grew our online audience/inquiries significantly.
PBN: What are some of the biggest difficulties facing owners of rental properties right now, and how do people like you and Nexus Property Management work to alleviate those problems?
ZHUKAVETS: These will be very similar answers to your second question, but I would also add that Nexus has completed over 200 RentReliefRI applications and got them approved for payments, which provided rental income for many owners for the last 18 months. It’s alarming and sad, simultaneously, but without that extra work and then government subsidies, many owners would have been foreclosed. In my opinion, it is a great example when government monetary policy and economic relief measures have worked and kept the economy afloat overall. It was needed, it was applied, and it helped.
PBN: How expensive is it for property owners to employ a property management firm such as Nexus to manage apartment rentals for them?
ZHUKAVETS: There is no clear-cut answer here. For some, it is expensive. For some, it’s necessary. Overall, we are very competitive and provide our owners and clients with below-industry-average monthly maintenance fees, as well as discounts on one-time fees, such as leasing or evictions. Overall, the monthly management fee is anywhere from 6% to 11% of rent collected from that unit. And it diminishes if you have more units under management with us.
In summary, I would like to mention that the property manager role has become more complex with intricate details and new programs that many owners will not be comfortable navigating on their own. The industry is changing, and property management has become a very valuable instrument, particularly for the owners who aren’t local and are too busy.
Marc Larocque is a PBN contributing writer.
