About West Yorkshire Property Management
My name is Chris Cordingley and I have lived and worked in the Wakefield Area for the last 20 years.
I bought my first buy to let property in October 2000 when I had a windfall payout from a pension plan. My wife and I worked hard and brought the property up to a very good rentable standard. We then rented the property immediately after advertising it to rent in the Wakefield Express and received 20 enquiries. We vetted our tenants very thoroughly, making enquiries with their previous landlords and employers to ensure that we had no problems in the future. Shortly after this we purchased our next property and so on until we had a portfolio of 12 properties including houses and flats. As the portfolio rose in numbers, we found that it became more difficult to look after the houses ourselves and so we placed some of our properties with a management company.
We found that whilst the houses were occupied and rent was being paid on time everything was fine with this, but it was not quite as straight forward when things went wrong. We had several bad experiences with rent not being paid. Repairs that had been reported to the agents were not being brought to our attention in order for us to deal with them immediately. On one occasion tenants were left without heating in freezing temperatures when a boiler went down for several days before an engineer was sent to resolve the problem.
We then decided that no property management company seemed capable of managing our properties as well as we could ourselves so we took the properties back into our own management.
During this time I began a new career as office manager for a very large property rental company based in Leeds where I worked for 7 years and learned the ins and outs of everything required for property management. I managed a team of 70+ people and looked after 700 properties ranging from a 1 bedroom flat through all types of private rental properties to student accommodation with 90+ bedrooms.
I decided to launch West Yorkshire Property Management Limited, a brand new concept in property management, designed to give the landlord the best possible service in the rental of their properties. The new company will strive to take all the work out of the management of independent landlord’s properties at a very competitive rate.