Every Agent Has a Story: Malcom Riley

Our next story comes from Malcom Riley, Real Estate Speaker and Trainer, who shares the two key lessons he learned after visiting some tenants to collect their rent.

• Investigate who’s behind the door before you visit an unfamiliar tenant; research and prepare accordingly.
• Have safety/location apps installed on your smartphone for when you find yourself in a dangerous situation, and tell your fellow managers where you’ll be before your trip.

Transcript

Hi, my name’s Malcom Riley, formerly Company Director of TNQ Rentals in Cairns. I now have my training company called malcomrileyspeaker.com.

My confession after 35 years, I’ve got lots of them, but the one I choose today was a property that was rented by someone we didn’t know. It was actually being managed by a barrister who had taken over a family estate, who employed me to go down to collect the rent from the tenants, who I didn’t know. He had very little detail on the tenants except they were six months in arrears. I went down to this property, the lady came out, met me on the footpath, who said language I’d never heard of before even in a pub.

A lot of volatility, a lot of aggression on the front yard. She was going to call A Current Affair and have me arrested and removed off the property and all I did was actually say [that] I was an agent to come and collect the rent.

I did retreat and I think that’s something that property managers can learn is to retreat when you have to retreat.

I went back, spoke to the barrister and he said, well you need to go back there and talk to them, try and get some money and we’ll lodge court papers and try and have an eviction. Now the tenant was an older lady, she had a son who’d served time in jail for stabbing someone.

Him and his friend were actually cutting up cars, stealing them and selling them off. She also had a daughter who was 18 and a friend who she was prostituting out and earning money, so she’s running a scam on cutting up cars and prostitution and I go in there to try and collect rent.

I went in there second time and I’m confronted with guns, loaded guns I found out after. There were six rifles, six handguns, two Rambo hunting knives, which they threatened to use. Since I didn’t carry a gun, I sort of retreated again back out of that property.

Went back to my office rather shaken, rang the police and had a very in-depth conversation with the police who then raided them. They arrested them, took them away and got lots of information about weapons, ammunition and the amount of laws they’d broken. We didn’t get the six months worth of rent, however, the bill to the barrister was huge.

The message for property managers out there is, every issue I’ve had like that that’s been threatening has been a tenant I haven’t put into the property and I didn’t know who the tenant was. It’s a big information point for us to look at who’s behind the door when we go there. Nothing says we’ve got to go into properties with the drug labs that are out there and the mental health issues that we have in our world today, that you have to go into the property. Step back, talk to your principals and the police are a great support.

The other thing that I’ve done in my office and other offices is put in an app, which is Daniel Morcombe Foundation app and I like to support that company – big red button as you can probably see on the screen.  If you feel like you’re in trouble, you can just press that and it alerts people that you’re in trouble who you have pre-listed in there.

Tips for property managers, carry some apps around with you, tell people where you’re going and nothing says you’ve got to go in the property. If you have a gut feeling about something’s quite not right there, don’t go in.