Discuss Property Management

The property management profession has developed for over half a century, but little attention has been devoted to its definition and origion.

This is probably because its definition is too trivial to most people, they would immediately relate property management to security, cleaning and maintenance of a property.

This general perception is reflected by Cheng, who regarded property management as a series of simple operations serving buildings such as cleaning the common areas, providing security guards to mind entrances and maintaining the common areas of building premises ans services.

Nevertheless,we should define property management in more strategic way, emphasizing the goals that property management aims to acheive.

For example, Scarrett(1983) has stated property management as 'seek to control property interests having regard to the short and long term objectives of the estate owner.

In fact, the existing view to property management can be succinctly categorized into two types of question : 

1. How

2. What.

'How' view regonizes property management as a branch of the management discipline, which emphasized how to plan,organize,command, coordinate and control property-related activities to archeive designated objectives.

'What' view refer to what kinds of operations are involved, ranging from traditional tasks, such as security, cleaning, and maintenance to the provision of value-added services.

Although this view is very concrete and specific, but it make little distinction between property management and housekeeping.