Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
General questions about how we manage your property
Lettings
Questions about how we manage new lettings
Maintenance
Questions about repairs and maintenance
Inspections
How we manage and report on inspections
General Questions
General questions about how we manage your property
Nope. Unlike most of our competitors, we don’t believe in locking you into a service that isn’t great for you. If you don’t love the service we provide, we want you to find the management that’s right for you.
We’re both!
We have managers to look after your properties, do inspections, find tenants, and everything else on the ground, and it’s all powered by our proprietary technology to automate day-to-day tasks while giving you and your tenants access to self-service portals.
Of course. We’re happy to arrange a phone call or a video call with the agent who will be managing your property. We don’t generally arrange in-person meetings with clients as it can take several hours out of our property manager’s day – but we’re real people and we know that sometimes it’s best to meet face to face. Most of the time though, our customers prefer to communicate over email, phone or live chat.
Absolutely – we want to take the burden of property management away from you. We can usually manage payment for things like council rates and water usage out of the rents received.
Just let us know what bills related to your property you’d like us to manage, and we’ll take care of it.
You just need to let us know who they are and we’ll take it from there. We will email your existing tenants and let them know about the change in management.
We’ll let them know payment details for rent, get them set up on the tenant app, and show them how to raise maintenance issue and get in touch with us.
We don’t think it’s fair to charge percentage fees. The work required to manage a property is the basically the same, regardless of the weekly rent.
No, at present we only manage residential properties.
Yes they do. Most of our competitors exclude GST from their pricing. Since you can’t claim GST on residential lettings, we think that’s just a way to try and hide their real cost!
“Traditional” agencies will normally charge you a percentage of the rent (typically between 8% and 11%) and then add on fees for other things. Then they hide the fact that their prices exclude GST, so you pay even more. Usually, it ends up costing owners $3000 to $5000 a year to have a property managed! Unlike these agencies, we charge a fee of just $10 per week to manage your property, regardless of how much it rents for. When we do inspections or lettings, we charge for those separately, because we think you should only pay for the work we actually do.
With KITT you have a dedicated Property Manager who you can contact with any issues, but you also get access to a dedicated team of specialists to provide support when you need it.
Because we’ve taken a new approach to building a property management company, you get the best of both worlds. We never compromise on service, so it’s always going to be at least as good as you would get with a traditional manager; but our platforms allow us to provide a level of personalised, round the clock service that traditional agencies can’t come close to!
They can get in touch with us using the tenant app or by calling or emailing us directly.
Tenants pay rent directly to our Trust Account. We reconcile this account daily to ensure your rent information is up to date and any late payments are promptly followed up.
We very rarely get to tribunal – we’ll generally settle matters before it ever gets to that that point, especially as it will have long-term repercussions for tenants seeking a rental in the future. But if we do, we have legal support to help you through the process.
It’s always changing – but we’re able to handle huge growth due to the fact that a huge amount of our processes are automated, making your life easier and enabling us to scale the number of properties we’re able to manage.
We make payments to owners weekly. We process all the disbursements each Friday and they should be with you no later than the next business day.
We’ll email you a full breakdown of your rent and any deductions for bills etc.
You’re free to go at any point – We don’t have any lock in terms, because we want you to have great service and not be forced to stay if you’re not happy.
Our terms are pretty easy: We manage your properties, you pay our fees. Simple.
We charge a property management fee of $10 per week inc GST. That covers tenancy management, rent management (including chasing arrears), rent reviews, managing communications, bill payments, reporting, compliance, and the KITT App.
We charge an additional fee as required when we do inspections ($100 each), new lettings ($500 per letting), maintenance (5% of the contractor’s fee), and attendance at mediation or the tenancy tribunal ($400).
We run everything from our central hub, except for our field agents. This means when we launch in a new area, we have the systems all set up, and we just need the hands on deck to provide localised knowledge to our new clients and tenants.
We’d be sorry to lose you, but there are no lock-in contracts with KITT. You can leave anytime you want.
We’ll charge you 4 weeks of fees while we’re arranging handover of the keys and documents, but there are no penalties and no transfer costs.
KITT offers a full range of property management services for residential property owners, including management, lettings, inspections, arranging maintenance, and anything else you would expect of a property manager.
Once you’ve decided to sign up with us, you just need to fill out a form with your contact details and information about the property you’d like us to manage. If you have existing tenants, we’ll get in touch to begin the handover process for your property, let your tenants know about the change in management, and give them information about where to pay their rent going forward and how to contact us for any issues.
If you have tenants who are leaving, or you’re tenanting your house for the first time and you need to find new tenants, we’ll get further information from you regarding your property details, ideal tenants, photography, and begin the process of listing your property so we can begin viewings.
We have a fair but zero-tolerance policy on rent arrears. It’s vital that we get on top of arrears right away because they can mount up incredibly fast.
We monitor the rent daily and contact tenants by text or email when the rent is 1 day overdue, and again at three days – usually by phone. Once the rent is 5 days overdue we will issue a 14-day rent demand and discuss with the owner whether to simultaneously begin a tenancy tribunal application. This may seem sudden, but the reality is that it can take weeks to get into the tribunal. If the rent is more than three weeks overdue, it’s most likely there will be no more rent received from that tenant. The important thing in that situation is therefore to end the tenancy before the arrears exceed the 4 weeks of bond we hold.
In reality, it (almost) never gets as far as an eviction. Nobody wants that on their record, and most tenants want to do the right thing. But they might need a little help, so we give them advice about sources of financial support such as WINZ and if necessary may work out a fair plan to bring the arrears back into line over a few weeks.
The key thing is getting the tenants talking, and getting them paying at least something to reduce the arrears and stop the situation getting worse. We’ll keep you informed throughout the process, so you always know where things stand.
KITT costs less than other agencies because we believe in giving you a fair price. Property managers have been overcharging their clients for years and there’s no justification for their high fees.
To allow us to give you the best price, we’ve built incredible technology that automates a lot of the things that take up property managers’ time. That means that our property managers can give you better service because they’re focussed on the things that need a real person, such as such as solving your problems and answering your queries.
We do our best to ensure you will always have the same property manager, plus field agent doing your inspections and viewings, so they have familiarity with your property. As we grow, our team may change, but we’ll always communicate any changes that will affect you directly!
Your day to day contact will not be based where you are, but of course our field agents will be.
Lettings
Questions about how we manage new lettings
Sure – we’ll give you the details of our preferred applicants, but by the time we’ve done our checks, there shouldn’t be any reason to decline them!
If you have professional quality photographs, we’re happy to use these. Most landlords have professional photographs of their properties ready before engaging with us. In most cases, the agent who sold you the property has images that can be used for the listing, or if you’ve had your property managed professionally previously, you may request the high-quality photographs that were taken.
Yes, you can – but we don’t recommend it. Property photography is a specific skill, and poor quality, amateur photos look bad on the listing, which often results in fewer people checking out the property. Those who come are mostly low-quality applicants, usually struggling to get better properties. So if the property doesn’t look good in photos, they think they’ll have a better chance of getting approved on that, since they’re expecting to see something with inferior qualities. It’s not really worth taking the risk.
But if you insist, then we’ll ask you to sign a waiver that states you’re going against our recommendation. If you later change your mind, then we’ll need to restart the listing for another fee, which is something that we want you to avoid.
We normally offer a discount on our fees if you find your own tenants. This would bring the normal $500 fee down to:
- $250 if you bring us the tenant before we advertise the property or run any viewings, but you still want us to carry out credit checks, take references, etc for the applicant.
- $100 if we’re just documenting the tenancy – i.e. you’ve done your own checks and are happy for us to just draw up a tenancy agreement without doing any further checks on the applicant.
Please not that this is ONLY if we haven’t done the advertising and any viewings. If we’ve been involved with organising the listing, advertising it, conducting viewings, background checks, etc, our usual $500 fee will apply.
We include rent appraisals in the $500 letting fee we charge when we rent out your property. If you need an appraisal for the bank, we can produce one prior to you signing up, but we charge a $50 fee if you aren’t yet a client. That $50 is credited against a letting fee if you subsequently join KITT. You can request a rent appraisal here – Rental Appraisal – Non-Managed Properties
Yes, we’re aware that other managers offer a “free” rent appraisal as part of their sales process. They do this because they know it will make you feel obligated to sign up for their service. But this isn’t “free” at all since their service costs many thousands a year more than KITT’s. They know they’ll have some people who ask for an appraisal with no intention of signing up. Those extra thousands you pay as a client go to subsidising this “free” service.
The other reason we see clients asking for a rent appraisal is for them to select a manager based on who gives them the highest valuation. This is usually an expensive mistake. Property managers are wise to this, and they’ll pump up their appraisal to get your business. It’s called “buying the listing”. Once they have you locked in on a long-term contract, they’ll waste a few weeks advertising it at that price, before announcing that the market has moved, and maybe you should try it at $50 to $100 less. This time costs you thousands in lost rent, but there’s no getting out of their contract at that point.
Remember, KITT has no lock-in contracts. You’re free to leave anytime you think we aren’t providing great value and great service. We don’t inflate our appraisals just to win your business. We only give you a genuine assessment based on robust market data. If you think we’ve missed something when appraising the rent price, we’re always happy to have that conversation. And we always get your agreement on a proposed rent before we advertise the property.
No, we don’t. In order to do the letting, we have to fully onboard the property, ensure its compliance, and handle all the necessary paperwork. Since there’s a lot of work involved, we can only do lettings for the properties that we manage.
Remember that there are no lock-in contracts at KITT. So, if you don’t like the service, you’re free to leave at any point.
We don’t. We’ve found that the rental market doesn’t expect houses to be staged for their photos. Depending on the state of the property at the time of photography, the house may be listed with furniture in the photos, even if that’s not included in the house rental.
KITT’s expert property managers use local area data to compare properties rented of similar size and quality. Data from the last six months are often used to get a better indication of what your property could rent for.
We do our best to find you tenants who will look after your property like it’s their own. We do background, credit, and reference checks. We also look at their payment history, and take references from their previous landlords and their employer. Finally, we can check them against the tenancy tribunal for any background issues, making sure due diligence is observed on your behalf.
We advertise all our properties on Trademe which has the largest audience of potential tenants.
Once we have all the information we need and photographs of your property, we can have the listing live quickly, and organise viewings for the weekend.
From there, once open homes are done, we should have candidates by the end of the 2nd week, and tenants signed in the 3rd week. Tenants typically have a 2 week notice period, and are ready to move in after that point once signed.
So all up, we estimate around 6 weeks total to let.
We run viewings three or four times on a mix of weekdays and weekends. We might reduce the frequency by two to three times depending on the situation.
No. All our inspections are charged separately.
The norm in NZ is for properties to come unfurnished – so renters generally have their own furniture. Demand for furnished properties, on the other hand, is lower since they get fewer viewers and are often requested to be unfurnished. The extra rent for furnished properties tends not to be that much more than unfurnished at around an average of $50 – $100 extra per week.
In addition, a furnished property will generally get a more transient tenant. These tenants tend to be in town temporarily for work, and plan to move again at the end of the lease. This may suit you, but if you want a longer-term tenant, unfurnished is the way to go.
Tenants will always put wear on your furniture. A couple of years of fair wear and tear on a couch or mattress will leave it looking far from new. The extra rent you get for furnishing might not even cover the cost of replacement. If you love any of the furniture you’re leaving, we’d strongly recommend you put it in storage.
Depending on the agreement, the cost of maintaining such items may be left to the tenant, while the cost to repair breaks caused by the tenant will not necessarily be automatically passed to the landlord.
There are exceptions to this of course. If your property is in a market where furnishing is the norm (e.g., some city-center apartments, student flats, etc.) then go with the flow. It’s also worth considering whether it’s difficult to bring the furniture in or out – will the tenants do a lot of damage to walls and skirting?
Partially furnished units can also be an option. It’s very common to have larger whiteware (fridges, dishwashers, washers/dryers) included in apartments and student accommodations. Just remember that you will be responsible for maintaining it if it breaks.
Nope! We just operate based upon the assumption that the code of compliance WILL be issued, which enables us to arrange tenants for as soon as the home is complete.
We advertise on Trade Me, so you can be assured that you get your property to have increased exposure.
The property manager will write the listing and base it on the knowledge of the area and property, alongside the inputs you have into the property. If you have an existing listing description that you’d like to use, please just let us know.
We’ve structured our letting fee with the knowledge that most rentals already have photographs available. We don’t think it’s fair to include a cost for a service that you might not even require from us. Generally, property photos are used year in and year out and a good-quality set of photos can be used for years to come.
If you require us to organise property photography for your listing, we’ll reach out to our network of talented property photographers in your region, and charge this service at cost plus a 5% management fee.
Most property managers are not professional photographers and therefore do not possess the skills needed behind the lens. It takes special equipment, an understanding of cameras, strategic use of light in each space, and superb photo editing skills to bring out the best in your property.
Maintenance
Questions about repairs and maintenance
Absolutely! We just let you know that something needs doing, and it’s up to you if you want to use our network, or source your own contractor.
We always want to avoid an expensive callout where it turns out that the tenant is using a piece of equipment incorrectly. To avoid this we get tenants to upload photos and videos of the issue when reporting a maintenance issue. We review these prior to involving tradespeople.
We also keep records of the equipment provided in your property, and wherever possible provide user manuals to tenants through the tenant portal.
Tenants report maintenance or repair requests through our tenant app.
Once we’ve received a maintenance request we review it to determine the most appropriate solution and will seek additional information from the tenant as required.
We have a network of tradies in every area we service. We’ll organise the contractor for you through our experienced maintenance manager, ensuring that costs are kept in line. We’ll never compromise on service quality to improve cost.
We have a robust process for finding contractors in each of the areas that we work. All of our contractors are selected based on reputation and we verify that they hold all the appropriate certification and insurance to undertake the work they are hired to do.
After a contractor undertakes work for us we get feedback about their service to ensure they are looking after your tenants.
We do not work with tradespeople who are unreliable or who overcharge for work.
When we organise maintenance on your property we charge 5% of the contractors bill. Please be aware that many contractors are now charging for a quote, so we typically won’t provide a quote for approval for minor jobs, as that will only push up the cost for you.
If it’s a super simple fix (e.g. jib stopping) – We’ll arrange it as owner-access and not charge for it.
Otherwise if it’s more complicated we’ll charge our regular 5% maintenance fees based on a quote for what the work would have cost.
If the estimated cost of the maintenance is over $250 we will obtain a quote from a tradesperson and get your approval if it exceeds our pre-authorised spending limit.
From there we will assign a tradesperson to the job and our scheduling system will arrange a time between the contractor and the tenants.
We aim to get approval for all maintenance ahead of time
Unless immediate action must be taken in an emergency situation, which would otherwise impact the tenant (i.e. no water, sewage, electricity)
Inspections
How we manage and report on inspections
Sure thing – just let us know your preference so we can adjust it according to your needs.
Most insurance companies require landlords to do inspections at least quarterly in order to maintain cover, so by default we schedule these every three months.
You can either handle inspections entirely yourself, or alternate the inspections with us. Some owners prefer to have this kind of regular check-in with their property. Just let us know your preferred inspection date and we’ll arrange access to the property with the tenants.
Whatever your choice is, our goal is to keep you on top of everything going on in your property.
Most insurance companies require landlords to complete inspections of the rental property every three, four or six months. A formal inspection is necessary so that landlords can identify any damages caused by the tenant, address any issues in the tenancy, and provide evidence of the inspection before any claim under the insurance policy is submitted.
Our inspection management system will alert us when it’s time to conduct an inspection, so you can be assured that your inspections are completed on time and will cover everything in the property.
KITT’s Associate Property Managers, Field Services Managers, and other staff receive regular professional training to perform their responsibilities according to our standards. In terms of inspection, they are trained to follow our rigorous processes and guidelines so your inspections are completed without issues.
Inspections are essential to ensure your home is being well looked after and identify any issues early. Our staff use custom inspection software to ensure the inspection covers all areas of concern and actively compares against the condition at the previous inspection.
Following the inspection, you’ll receive notice of any items requiring your attention, and you can access any of your reports through the KITT App.
KITT’s standard inspection fee is $100. This includes a full comprehensive report of the inspection.
You can choose how often you want us to inspect a property. Most insurance companies require landlords to do inspections at least quarterly in order to maintain cover, so by default we schedule these every three months. Our systems ensure these requirements are met by automatically scheduling an inspection at a convenient time for the tenants.
If you’d like them done less frequently, i.e. every 6 months, we’re more than happy to arrange this based upon your needs – the important thing is we’re able to keep an eye on any emerging issues before they get out of control.
KITT’s property inspection report provides a comprehensive writeup of your rental property. For example, our Entry Inspection report contains hundreds of photos to ensure that we can use it as baseline to determine any new or pre-existing damage throughout the course of your next tenancy.
Before delivering this report to you, our Field Services Managers will conduct a quality check on each report, ensuring nothing has been missed.
KITT’s Associate Property Managers (APM) will take care of your property inspections. Our APMs use our custom inspection software that takes them from one room to the next and guides them on what information to include, making sure no detail is left out.
We have APMs based in each territory that we service, and we try to keep the same inspector for your property wherever possible. However, in cases where we have staff changes or your APM is unavailable during the scheduled inspection, we’ll send another competent member of our team who will deliver the quality of service that we are known for.