Peter LohmannAll Things Residential Property Management | CEO of RL Property Management | Co-Founder of Crane

2 Questions Every PM Should Ask Their Bank 🏦

8 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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1:25

In this segment, the host advises product managers and business owners to interrogate their banks about how trust accounts are insured and whether they are vulnerable to liens, garnishments, or other governing‑entity freezes. The first question probes FDIC coverage: is the $250,000 insurance limit applied per tax‑ID (i.e., the aggregate balance) or per beneficiary within the account? The second question asks if, in the event of a lien or garnishment order against the company’s tax ID, the specific trust accounts would be frozen. The discussion highlights that improper account setup or bank misunderstanding of trust‑account rules can expose assets to risk. The speaker cautions against trying to teach the bank how to manage these accounts and suggests simply asking the questions and evaluating the bank’s answers, noting that many banks may not meet the required compliance standards, especially in certain jurisdictions like Ohio.

Chapters

you should be asking a couple of questions based off of your trust account. And of course, if you have several trust accounts, list those. How much would you consider this account insured for? Is this account insured for $250,000 because under my tax ID number, I have that much at the bank, or is it insured per beneficiary within this bank account? That's really going to help you understand the FDIC perspective. At the end of the day, this is all going to tell you whether or not the account's truly set up correctly or not and being managed correctly. What actually does impact you in your industry more than anything is what I refer to as like governing entity liens, lawsuits, any type of garnishment where a governing entity is ordering your bank to freeze those funds. So the question that I would ask within this request is, based off of these account numbers, if you were to receive a lien or a lien order to freeze assets under my company's tax ID number, would these specific accounts be subject to lien or garnishment? And if the answer is yes, again, that just goes to show that they're not managing the account correctly. They also don't even really understand what kind of account this is, right? Because at the end of the day, what that's saying in both scenarios, whether it's the FDIC question or the garnishment question, what that's saying is We are considering these funds your assets, right?
I just don't even know if there are banks in Ohio that have that level of, you know, property management trust compliance.
You can ask your bank these questions. If the answer is not in your favor, which most of the time, unfortunately, it probably won't be, I would never recommend you trying to teach your bank how to do it.