HAWAIIAN AMERICANA REALTY, INC.

This review is not about using Hawaii Americana Realty to book a vacation or to purchase property but about using Hawaii Americana Realty as your management company for a vacation rental that you own. Picking out a management company for your property is one of the most crucial decisions that you need to make regarding your investment and you typically have to make the decision without a lot of facts to base it on. I’m hoping this review will give some good insight that will help others decide whether to choose or not choose Hawaii Americana based on personal preferences. I’ll start with the good: Very Good - For minor maintenance repairs they do not charge for labor. Over the course of 2 years, we were able to take advantage of this feature a couple of times and saved a few dollars. Good – Delivered 80+% occupancy (for transparency please note that the property is in Waikiki in a very big tourist area). The commission they charged was in line with other full-service management companies. They also have a presence in the area as the vacation rental aspect is only one area of their business (they also act as a seller/buyer agent for property sales and a broker for long term rentals). One can just sit back and wait for their monthly check as you pretty much have no obligations. Now, onto the bad Bad - Extremely flexible cancellation policy. While they still receive a non-refundable fee for cancellations within the cancellation window none of the amount is forwarded to the owners and since they allow cancellations very close to the stay date it becomes hard to re-rent at going rates. Sometimes, they even gave a full refund outside of the refund window and when asked why they stated that “even if they don’t stay in your unit and therefore cannot leave a review of your unit, they can still leave a review of the management company that booked the stay”. Therefore, they were putting their needs ahead of ours. Bad - Lack of visibility. There is no owner’s portal so you do not know in advance the monthly amount you will be getting prior to getting it. This makes it very hard to balance a budget, especially when stays are coming and going in the public calendars based on their cancellation policies. Based on all the management companies I have spoken with since they have been the only one without an owner’s portal. Bad – Income based on expectations from conversation with owner of Hawaii Americana. We were told we could expect a certain range of rent charged per night but we never came close to it. They also do not seem to have a dynamic software pricing system in place. After covid restrictions eased up and the Hawaii rental market began booming we tried to find out if we could expect to get the nightly range that they first communicated or it they needed to revise the figure, but no answer was ever forthcoming. That leads to the very bad (below). Very bad – Communication. One of the main reasons you may want to use a management company is so that there are regular eyes on your investment (and in Hawaii by law you need to have someone on island represent it). When you become leveraged to purchase an investment you want to know that it is being watched after closely and everything is being communicated to you. Twice we had major damage in our unit due to water leaks from units above us. Both times it was weeks before we were told about it, and when we were it came from the building supervisor, not the management company. The first time the owner at Hawaii Americana stated that the cleaners (company controlled) never let him know there was any damage even though they seated 3 separate groups of guests between the time of the damage and the time that we were notified of the damage. After promising to do a better job of communicating we had damage 2 months later and again were not notified by Hawaii Americana. This time they stated that the receptionist/admin (whose name I am leaving out because I do not want to violate any rules on this site) was told to contact us, but she never did. Both these instances required us to go through insurance and both times it was multiple weeks after the damage before we found out and were able to start the insurance process. Also, it was really hard to get any kind of response from them. Usually, I had to send multiple emails to get an answer to my questions. While the questions may not have seemed important to them, they were for us being thousands of miles away and just wanting to know what was going on. They prefer that you schedule a phone call with them (which they are very good at keeping) but being in a time zone six hours ahead, email is our preferred method. In all honesty, between this and not having an owner’s portal their IT infrastructure seems to be behind many of their competitors, but then again if you just want to sign over the management of your unit, trust that it is being run correctly, and just sit back and wait for a monthly check then maybe these things are not important in your decision. In summary, if you own a vacation place and want someone to run it and you don’t want to be bothered then Hawaii Americana Realty is a very good management company for you to use. However, if it is a major investment on your end and you want to know what is going on with it and also want to maximize your investment, maybe you should consider a different management company than Hawaii Americana Realty. I hope this helps with your decision. Good luck with your investment!

He's been excellent! He's very hardworking, accessible, and very honest.

gr8

We worked with Mr. Howard for almost one year while we searched for the most suitable property, and covered most areas of Oahu. Mark Howard was responsive, attentive and understood our needs. We received confident answers on foreclosures, short sales and finally we settled on a traditional property transaction Through the 30% Buyers Commission Rebate offered by Hawaiian Americana Realty we saved over $4,320.00 that we received on the closing statement and was used towards our closing costs.