![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingToday was my 9am-5pm day (my other four work days are 10am-6pm), but I ended up staying to almost 6:30pm (even after Mr. Geniality left for the evening), because I was trying to catch up on work I had been tabling while I tried to get through more immediately urgent tasks.
See, August is basically our hell month. Nobody takes vacation in August. That's not quite a hard and fast company rule -- you'd probably be able to wrangle an exception for a family wedding or birth, and definitely for deaths or whatnot -- but it is darn close. Which is because August is when the vast majority of our old tenants move out and new tenants move in, with very short intervals for us to turn over the apartments.
Turnover, for those not in the rental business, means doing a move-out inspection (aka, what ungodly mess have they left behind?), fixing anything broken, moving furniture in or out, occasional miscellaneous upgrades (new bathroom, new kitchen, whatever), and giving the place a good scrub-down.
Ideally, we'd have a week per apartment. Our Collegetown office deliberately structures all leases to leave a 5-7 day gap between lease end and lease start. Downtown... does not. *headdesk* Since I moved to the downtown office, we've started structuring leases with a built-in 2-day gap (that is, a lease that starts August 5 of one year will end on August 3 of the following year), but that's still not enough. Hopefully this coming year we can build in a 3-day gap (ie, an August 5 start date will have an August 2 end date). Otherwise lease dates creep later and later until there's a disjunct and we can write a 10-month or 11-month lease and jump an apartment back to a June start. Which is not really sustainable. *sigh*
Our Maintenance department has been slammed, and the situation was not improved in the slightest by one of our long-term staff quitting to go work for Walmart (partly family reasons, partly they got swapped from one set of buildings to a different set of buildings last year and had issues with losing their fief). We have a temporary contract guy and their staff filling in, but again, that's not sustainable long-term.
I have been pushing hard to get apartments staged, photographed, and videoed so we will have good virtual tours to show people and hopefully minimize both in-person tours and real-time virtual tours. I am really tired of tenants having my personal phone number, you know? And nobody seems willing to help me push for getting WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype installed on either our company iPhone or one of our company iPads so Mr. Geniality and I don't have to use our own goddamn phones for shit that should never need to TOUCH our personal phones!
We have a summer temp, who has been super-helpful getting apartments staged! However, they have a limited number of hours per week, and spend a bunch of them on Monday (when I'm in Collegetown) and Tuesday (when I'm off) so I get limited assistance Wednesday through Friday. In fact, they used up all this week's hours as of today so Friday is anybody's guess. *hands* At least I have Mr. Geniality this Saturday, so I can leave him in the office to wrangle move-ins and crud while I go slam through some apartments?
Also we need to do voiceover tracks and intro tracks for SO MANY VIDEOS, because Mr. Geniality lost his voice going on four weeks ago, and only just today finally got a diagnosis of the problem. (He had been given antibiotics and steroids, neither of which did much.) Apparently one of his vocal cords is paralyzed. This is, to put it bluntly, not good! Treatments can take up to a year to be effective! This is going to deeply screw up his quality of life!
We may end up with me doing behind-camera vocal tracks for all videos starting tomorrow, which I am not looking forward to because I don't like the sound of my own recorded voice. I also flatly refuse to be a visible on-screen guide for various reasons that boil down to, "I don't want to and you can't make me." I'm unsure how to deal with our stash of videos where we filmed Mr. Geniality doing a hoarse, half-whispered closing spiel ("Rent for apartments in X building includes Y utilities. Assorted other information. Thank you for coming to Apartment Z. Call us today for availability") with the intention of him lip-synching later, if he won't have enough voice to lip-synch until... I dunno, November at the earliest? Vocal cord paralysis treatments seem to be a long-term game.
...
Also there's church Board of Trustees stuff that I totally dropped for two weeks because I couldn't even (there are good reasons I told them not to make me president!), and continuing education requirements for Not the IRS, and at some point my parents want to come visit (and bring me back my hoodie that I forgot at their house in NJ!!!), and I need to do research on buying a car, and and and and and.
*wilts*
At least downtown gets a break between August and the start of rental madness. In Collegetown, it just slams straight from one to the next.
See, August is basically our hell month. Nobody takes vacation in August. That's not quite a hard and fast company rule -- you'd probably be able to wrangle an exception for a family wedding or birth, and definitely for deaths or whatnot -- but it is darn close. Which is because August is when the vast majority of our old tenants move out and new tenants move in, with very short intervals for us to turn over the apartments.
Turnover, for those not in the rental business, means doing a move-out inspection (aka, what ungodly mess have they left behind?), fixing anything broken, moving furniture in or out, occasional miscellaneous upgrades (new bathroom, new kitchen, whatever), and giving the place a good scrub-down.
Ideally, we'd have a week per apartment. Our Collegetown office deliberately structures all leases to leave a 5-7 day gap between lease end and lease start. Downtown... does not. *headdesk* Since I moved to the downtown office, we've started structuring leases with a built-in 2-day gap (that is, a lease that starts August 5 of one year will end on August 3 of the following year), but that's still not enough. Hopefully this coming year we can build in a 3-day gap (ie, an August 5 start date will have an August 2 end date). Otherwise lease dates creep later and later until there's a disjunct and we can write a 10-month or 11-month lease and jump an apartment back to a June start. Which is not really sustainable. *sigh*
Our Maintenance department has been slammed, and the situation was not improved in the slightest by one of our long-term staff quitting to go work for Walmart (partly family reasons, partly they got swapped from one set of buildings to a different set of buildings last year and had issues with losing their fief). We have a temporary contract guy and their staff filling in, but again, that's not sustainable long-term.
I have been pushing hard to get apartments staged, photographed, and videoed so we will have good virtual tours to show people and hopefully minimize both in-person tours and real-time virtual tours. I am really tired of tenants having my personal phone number, you know? And nobody seems willing to help me push for getting WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype installed on either our company iPhone or one of our company iPads so Mr. Geniality and I don't have to use our own goddamn phones for shit that should never need to TOUCH our personal phones!
We have a summer temp, who has been super-helpful getting apartments staged! However, they have a limited number of hours per week, and spend a bunch of them on Monday (when I'm in Collegetown) and Tuesday (when I'm off) so I get limited assistance Wednesday through Friday. In fact, they used up all this week's hours as of today so Friday is anybody's guess. *hands* At least I have Mr. Geniality this Saturday, so I can leave him in the office to wrangle move-ins and crud while I go slam through some apartments?
Also we need to do voiceover tracks and intro tracks for SO MANY VIDEOS, because Mr. Geniality lost his voice going on four weeks ago, and only just today finally got a diagnosis of the problem. (He had been given antibiotics and steroids, neither of which did much.) Apparently one of his vocal cords is paralyzed. This is, to put it bluntly, not good! Treatments can take up to a year to be effective! This is going to deeply screw up his quality of life!
We may end up with me doing behind-camera vocal tracks for all videos starting tomorrow, which I am not looking forward to because I don't like the sound of my own recorded voice. I also flatly refuse to be a visible on-screen guide for various reasons that boil down to, "I don't want to and you can't make me." I'm unsure how to deal with our stash of videos where we filmed Mr. Geniality doing a hoarse, half-whispered closing spiel ("Rent for apartments in X building includes Y utilities. Assorted other information. Thank you for coming to Apartment Z. Call us today for availability") with the intention of him lip-synching later, if he won't have enough voice to lip-synch until... I dunno, November at the earliest? Vocal cord paralysis treatments seem to be a long-term game.
...
Also there's church Board of Trustees stuff that I totally dropped for two weeks because I couldn't even (there are good reasons I told them not to make me president!), and continuing education requirements for Not the IRS, and at some point my parents want to come visit (and bring me back my hoodie that I forgot at their house in NJ!!!), and I need to do research on buying a car, and and and and and.
*wilts*
At least downtown gets a break between August and the start of rental madness. In Collegetown, it just slams straight from one to the next.
