GEMA Properties is a private administration office in Mexico, and the property management services for foreign owners on this page are four. This page is none of them: it tells you which to open, and in what order they start. Property management services for homeowners who live in another country are judged on one question, and price is not it: who answers for the house on a Tuesday in September, when you are four flights away and a pump has stopped.
Four services · One is the base · Two rest on it · One is asked for and paid per use · Six areas and Mexico City.
Owners who compare property management company services meet them as a single package almost everywhere; here they are four, and each is described below by where it ends, because the boundary is the part nobody explains until something has gone wrong. What professional property management services amount to, once the brochures are set aside, is a name and a boundary: who is answerable, and for what.
Management of the house. Everything that happens to the building whether or not it earns: who holds the keys, who enters, what is inspected and on which date, which of the house's accounts are paid before they fall due. It ends where income begins, because it publishes no dates and quotes no nightly rate. It is what an American owner usually means by second home management services, and on its own it is enough for a house nobody ever pays to sleep in — the whole of it is on full-service management for luxury homes.
Letting. Added on top of that one, and only if somebody sleeps in the house paying. It takes the calendar, the rates, the stay and the registrations that come into existence with the first paid night. It ends at the breakdown: a dead pump belongs to the first service, house full or empty. What letting one here involves is on vacation rental management.
The monthly statement. Not a service anyone chooses — it is what the other two leave behind in writing, on one date a month that does not move, let or not let. It ends at the line: it records and decides nothing. What it carries is on monthly owner statements.
Concierge. The fourth runs on no calendar: a chef for one evening, a driver, a house standing ready when your flight gets in, a delivery received in your name. Single errands, priced one at a time and billed on their own — optional, paid for, outside the management fee, so twelve months without a request produce no charge.
The four property management services above are residential property management services for single private houses: one owner, one house, one office answerable for it. This office is not one of the international property management services chains: one country, seven places, and the same people at both ends of the year.
Property management for second-home owners starts in the month the deed is signed rather than in the month something fails, and the order matters more than the number. First the management of the house: until somebody holds the keys there is nothing to report and nobody to call. Letting comes second if it comes at all, because it arrives carrying obligations a closed house does not have. The statement is not switched on but produced — the first month of operation already makes one. The concierge waits, at no cost, until you want something the house cannot do alone.
All four run in six areas of Mexico and in Mexico City. A foreign owner tends to ask this the other way round — not which service, but whether anybody works where the house actually stands.
| If this is your house | Start with |
|---|---|
| The purchase has just closed and you fly home next week | Management of the house, and nothing else yet |
| Nobody has opened it in months | Management of the house, beginning with an inventory |
| It already lets, and you cannot say what was spent | The monthly statement, which is that question |
| It stands empty most of the year and you want it to earn | Letting, on top of the management of the house |
| Guests arrive in ten days and the house is not ready | The concierge, on top of what is already contracted |
| It is a condominium, to be run for all its owners | None of the four: we answer to one owner, not an assembly |
One is enough to begin with, and it is almost always the management of the house. The other three attach to it: letting rests on it, the statement is made out of what those two did, and an errand needs somebody who already holds the keys.
The week the deed is signed, not the week something first goes wrong, because the first month is an inventory rather than a routine: what the house has, what it owes, and which of its papers nobody can find. That inventory is the one piece of work that is easier while you are still in the country, which is why it comes before any decision about letting.
No, and the two are opposites in who they answer to: a condominium administrator reports to an assembly about a building, while this office reports to one owner about one house. Where your house sits inside a condominium, its rules and its dues are lines in your file; running the building is not ours to do.
The concierge. The other three are contracted by the month; the fourth is not contracted at all until you ask for something, one errand at a time.
Choosing between the four is not the first step. The first is that somebody looks at the house and writes down what it needs across a year: which of the four that calls for, in which order, and what can wait.