Working with New Heights Property Management — What Actually Happens
I spent about three years dealing with New Heights Property Management on a mixed-use commercial property. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't smooth either. There are a few things I wish someone had told me before I signed, mostly about how their reporting works and where people get tripped up. Their tenant portal is decent. It's built on a standard Yardi-based backend, which means if you already know Yardi, you're halfway there. If you don't, expect about two weeks of fumbling through screens that label the same feature differently depending on which dropdown you're in. The portal handles maintenance requests, rent payments, and document storage without much drama. That part works fine. Where things get sticky is the monthly owner statement. I learned this the hard way when I was reconciling my third month and found a line item labeled "miscellaneous operational adjustment" for $847. There was no breakdown. I called support and it turned out to be a proration adjustment from a mid-month lease renewal they'd processed but never properly flagged in the system. The workaround was simple once I knew it: every month, right after the statements drop, I pull the transaction detail report and filter by variance over $100. That catches almost everything before it compounds. Without that habit, small reconciliation gaps slip through and stack up over the year.
New Heights Property Management — What You Should Know Before Signing
Their standard management agreement runs 3% of collected rent for residential, which is about average. They charge a leasing fee equal to one month's rent, but here's the thing most people miss: that fee doesn't include re-leasing during an existing lease term. If a tenant breaks lease in month eight and you need them to fill it, that's another full month's rent on top. I ran into this when a tenant's business closed unexpectedly and we needed to turn the unit in under six weeks. The re-lease fee added nearly $4,000 to what I had budgeted for turnover. Read the fee schedule carefully before you commit. Their maintenance coordination is another area where expectations matter. They use a routing system that dispatches vendors through a preferred network. For standard repairs — leaky faucets, thermostat issues, lock replacements — it works well. Turnaround is usually 24 to 48 hours. But for specialty work like HVAC compressor replacements or structural repairs, their preferred vendor network doesn't always have capacity. When that happens, you're given the option to use your own contractor, but the paperwork process for outside vendors adds about five business days to the timeline because they require certificates of insurance and W-9 forms on file before anything gets approved. If you're managing a property with older systems, plan for that delay and have backup vendor contacts ready beforehand. One counter-intuitive thing about their system: the delinquency workflow. New Heights Property Management runs automatic dunning notices at day 3, day 7, and day 15. Most owners assume this is good coverage. It isn't. The problem is that the system treats partial payments as resolved until the remaining balance hits day 15, which means a tenant paying $400 of a $1,200 rent check won't trigger the full collections trigger until two weeks later. I started cross-referencing the payment log against the lease terms every Friday morning and flagging partial payments manually. This took about ten minutes a week and caught three tenants in one year who would have otherwise fallen through the automatic workflow without any late-fee assessment for nearly a month.
The annual property inspection is included in their base fee, but the report format is standardized and fairly generic. It covers the basics — roof condition, HVAC age, plumbing issues, exterior integrity — but it doesn't go deep into capital expenditure forecasting. If you need a proper reserve study, budget it separately. Their in-house team can do it for an additional $1,500 to $2,500 depending on property size, or you can hire an independent reserve company. I went independent the second year and got a more detailed breakdown of imminent replacements that New Heights' template wouldn't have captured. On the positive side, their financial reporting exports cleanly. The general ledger matches their owner statements exactly, which makes tax season straightforward. Their AP/AR integration with QuickBooks is solid, and I never had a single mismatch during three years of monthly close. That alone saved me probably fifteen hours a year compared to my previous management company, which used a legacy system that required manual journal entries. The biggest bottleneck I encountered was their response time for non-routine owner questions. Maintenance emergencies get answered within an hour. Anything else — lease amendment requests, accounting clarifications, vendor disputes — typically takes two to four business days. During peak season, June through September, I'd sometimes wait five or six days. If you're an owner who likes to make quick decisions on property changes, this friction will annoy you. The workaround is batching your questions into a single email rather than sending them piecemeal. They respond faster to consolidated requests because it reduces back-and-forth on their end.
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I wouldn't call them the worst management company I've worked with, but they're not exceptional either. They're competent for standard residential portfolios with predictable needs. If you have a complex mixed-use property with unusual lease structures or need proactive capital planning, you'll spend more time chasing answers than you should. For a straightforward single-family or small multi-family portfolio, they'll handle things adequately and the automated systems do most of the heavy lifting on their own.
