Commercial Plumbing Services for Property Management
in the Dallas Fort Worth Area

A property manager or estate manager is a person or firm charged with operating a real estate property for a fee when the owner is unable to attend to such details personally or is not interested in doing so. The property may be individual title owned or owned under the sectional title, share block company owned, and may be registered for residential, commercial office, and retail or industrial use. In 2006, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Office of Occupational Statistics reported that there were 329,000 property managers employed in the United States. Typical duties expected of a property manager include finding/evicting, dealing with tenants, and coordinating with the owner’s wishes. In addition, such arrangements may require the property manager to collect rents and pay necessary expenses and taxes, making periodic reports to the owner, or the owner may delegate specific tasks and deal with others directly.

A property manager may arrange for a wide variety of services, as may be requested by the owner of the property, for a fee. Where a dwelling (vacation home, second home) is only periodically occupied, the property manager might arrange for heightened security monitoring, house-sitting, storage and shipping of goods, and other local sub-contracting necessary to make the property comfortable when the owner is in residence (utilities, systems operating, supplies and staff on hand, etc.). Property management can also include commercial properties where the property manager may run the business and manage the property. Some jurisdictions may require a property manager to be licensed for the profession.

The property manager has a primary responsibility to the landlord and a secondary responsibility to the agency. The relationship the property manager has with the landlord and the tenant is crucial in forming the expectations of both parties to the lease since both parties will seek and expect certain rights and benefits.

Multifamily residential (also known as multidwelling unit or MDU) is a classification of housing where multiple separate housing units for residential inhabitants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex.[1] Units can be next to each other (side-by-side units), or stacked on top of each other (top and bottom units). A common form is an apartment building. Many intentional communities incorporate multifamily residences, such as in cohousing projects.[ Sometimes units in a multifamily residential building are condominiums, where typically the units are owned individually rather than leased from a single apartment building owner. Apartment building or block of flats – a building with multiple apartments. There can be multiple apartments on each floor and there are often multiple floors. Apartment buildings can range in many sizes, some with only a few apartments, other with hundreds of apartments on many floors, or any size in between. There are often inside hallways and inside entrances to each apartment, but outside entrances to each apartment are also possible. An apartment building can be owned by one party and each of the apartments rented to tenants or each of the apartments can be owned as a condominium by separate parties.
Mixed use building – a building with space for both commercial, business, or office use, and space for residential use. Possible arrangements include the commercial/business use on the first or first couple floors and one or more apartments or residential spaces on the upper floors. Another possibility is to have the commercial/business area up front and the residential area in the back. Some or maybe all of the space may be used by the owner or some or all the business and residential units may be leased by the owner. Condominium ownership is also possible.
Apartment community – a collection of apartment buildings on adjoining pieces of land, generally owned by one entity. The buildings often share common grounds and amenities, such as pools, parking areas, and a community clubhouse, used as leasing offices for the community.

A landlord is the owner of a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate which is rented or leased to an individual or business, who is called a tenant (also a lessee or renter). When a juristic person is in this position, the term landlord is used. Other terms include lessor and owner. The term landlady may be used for the female owners. A rental agreement, or lease, is the contract defining such terms as the price paid, penalties for late payments, the length of the rental or lease, and the amount of notice required before either the homeowner or tenant cancels the agreement. In general, responsibilities are given as follows: the homeowner is responsible for making repairs and performing property maintenance, and the tenant is responsible for keeping the property clean and safe.

Many owners hire a property management company to take care of all the details of renting their property out to a tenant. This usually includes advertising the property and showing it to prospective tenants, negotiating and preparing the written leases or license agreements,and then, once rented, collecting rent from the tenant and performing repairs as needed. In the United States, residential homeowner–tenant disputes are primarily governed by state law (not federal law) regarding property and contracts. State law and, in some places, city law or county law, sets the requirements for eviction of a tenant. Generally, there are a limited number of reasons for which a landlord or landlady can evict his or her tenant before the expiration of the tenancy, though at the end of the lease term the rental relationship can generally be terminated without giving any reason. Some cities, counties, and States have laws establishing the maximum rent a landlord can charge, known as rent control, or rent regulation, and related eviction. There is also an implied warranty of habitability, whereby a landlord must maintain safe, decent and habitable housing, meeting minimum safety requirements such as smoke detectors and a locking door. The most common disputes result from either the landlord’s failure to provide services or the tenant’s failure to pay rent—the former can also lead to the latter. The withholding of rent is justifiable cause for eviction, as often explained in the lease. Tenancies above a couple of years are normally called leases and tend to be lengthy; if more than seven years a new leasehold estate must be registered.[6] These are governed by few of the above rules and are in longer examples deliberately more akin to full ownership than tenancies, in general. They seldom require a sizeable ground rent. The law has not regulated hefty break/resale charges nor does it prevent the sale of leasehold houses; in the 2010s certain of these proposals have been widely consulted upon and are being drafted. Broadly, legislation allows such lessees (tenants) to club together to gain the Right to Manage, and the right to buy the landlord’s interest (to collectively enfranchise). It allows them individually to extend their leases for a new, smaller sum (“premium”), which if the tenants have enfranchised will not normally be demanded/recommended every 15–35 years. Notice requirements and forms tend to be strict. In smaller examples the tenant, depending on a simple mathematical division of the building, may be able to enfranchise individually. Statute of 1925 implies into nearly all leases (tenancies at low rent and at a premium (fine, initial large sum)) of property that they can be sold (by the lessee, assigned); reducing any restriction to one whereby the landlord may apply standard that is “reasonable” vetting, without causing major delay. This is often known as the “statutory qualified covenant on assignment/alienation”.

In the overall diminishing domain of social housing, exceptionally, lessees widely acquire over time the Right to Buy for a fixed discount on the market price of the home.

An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are many names for these overall buildings, see below. The housing tenure of apartments also varies considerably, from large-scale public housing, to owner occupancy within what is legally a condominium (strata title or commonhold), to tenants renting from a private landlord (see leasehold estate). The term apartment is favored in North America (although in some cities flat is used for a unit which is part of a house containing two or three units, typically one to a floor[1]). In the UK, the term apartment is more usual in professional real estate and architectural circles where otherwise the term flat is used commonly, but not exclusively, for an apartment on a single level (hence a ‘flat’ apartment).

In some countries, the word “unit” is a more general term referring to both apartments and rental business suites. The word ‘unit’ is generally used only in the context of a specific building.

“Mixed-use buildings” combine commercial and residential uses within the same structure. Typically, mixed-use buildings consist of businesses on the lower floors (often retail in street-facing ground floor and supporting subterranean levels) and residential apartments on the upper floors. (Condominium, public housing, owner-occupancy, etc.)

Tenement law refers to the feudal basis of permanent property such as land or rents. It may be found combined as in “Messuage or Tenement” to encompass all the land, buildings and other assets of a property.

In the United States, some apartment-dwellers own their units, either as a housing cooperative, in which the residents own shares of a corporation that owns the building or development; or in a condominium, whose residents own their apartments and share ownership of the public spaces. Most apartments are in buildings designed for the purpose, but large older houses are sometimes divided into apartments. The word apartment denotes a residential unit or section in a building. In some locations, particularly the United States, the word connotes a rental unit owned by the building owner, and is not typically used for a condominium.

Apartment buildings are multi-story buildings where three or more residences are contained within one structure. Such a building may be called an apartment building, apartment complex, flat complex, block of flats, tower block, high-rise or, occasionally, mansion block , especially if it consists of many apartments for rent. A high-rise apartment building is commonly referred to as a residential tower, apartment tower

A high-rise building is defined by its height differently in various jurisdictions. It may be only residential, in which case it might also be called a tower block, or it might include other functions such as hotels, offices, or shops. There is no clear difference between a tower block and a skyscraper, although a building with fifty or more stories is generally considered a skyscraper High-rise buildings became possible with the invention of the elevator and cheaper, more abundant building materials. Their structural system usually is made of reinforced concrete and steel.

A low-rise building and mid-rise buildings have fewer stories, but the limits are not always clear. a low-rise as “an enclosed structure below 115 feet which is divided into regular floor levels.” “a multiple-unit low-rise dwelling having considerable lawn or garden space.”[10] The apartment buildings are often arranged around courtyards that are open at one end. Such a garden apartment shares some characteristics of a townhouse: each apartment has its own building entrance, or shares that entrance via a staircase and lobby that adjoins other units immediately above and/or below it. Unlike a townhouse, each apartment occupies only one level. Such garden apartment buildings are almost never more than three stories high, since they typically lack elevators. However, the first “garden apartment” buildings in New York, USA, built in the early 1900s, were constructed five stories high. Some garden apartment buildings place a one-car garage under each apartment. The interior grounds are often landscaped.