HMO Management in Medway: Why I'll Never Self-Manage Again (And You Probably Shouldn't Either)
Let me tell you about a Tuesday night in November — cold, proper Medway cold, the kind that comes off the Medway river and bites — when my phone lit up at 2:14am. Six-bedroom HMO in Gillingham. Boiler gone. Six tenants, six different angry messages, one of them — God bless him — had already started a group chat and added me to it. I lay there in bed reading messages roll in like I was watching a slow-motion car crash, and I remember thinking: there has to be a better way to do this. There was. I just hadn't found it yet. I'd been doing HMO management Medway -style — which is to say, doing it myself, convinced I was saving money, convinced I had it all under control. I did not have it all under control. I had a spreadsheet, a folder of deposit certificates, a letting agent who mostly dealt with standard single-lets and had the faintest idea what an Article 4 direction was, and an increasingly short fuse. That's not HMO management. That's organised chaos with a Yale ...