The Successful Landlord Blog

It’s the moment every landlord dreads!  No, not finding out that the a/c is busted.  Sure that one’s pretty huge, but if you know the right repairman, even that one can be far less painful than it has to be.  The OTHER dreadful thing - your tenant is broke/relocating/divorcing/marrying and has to move.  Sure, you’ve done everything that you can possibly do to make your house and the maintenance of it a dream come true.   They are so happy there that they never want to leave.  Another year passes and you glance at the calendar to see the renewal date has come and you promptly send out the renewal agreement.  Thinking nothing of it, you continue about your business without a worry.  They don’t ever want to leave –  right?

Days pass until one evening you see the caller id flicker with their name.  Your heart sinks to your knees.  When you answer, you find that your fear is confirmed.  Life has thrown a curve ball and they are unable to stay put.  Worse yet, the tenant is squeezing out with barely the required notice, leaving you no time to find that much needed new tenant and to handle those necessary inspections, repairs, yardwork and a top to bottom cleaning. Read the rest of this entry »

So, recently a Realtor I know told me of a deal that fell through 2-days shy of closing due to an idiotic lending policy, or at least that was the bank’s excuse.

Apparently a buyer was in contract to purchase a piece of real estate as part of a short-sale. Granted, short-sales are not normal real estate transactions in that there are usually extra variables thrown into the deal which, more often than not, complicate things  sometimes to the point of insanity.

So while the buyer is in contract to purchase a short-sale property, the geniuses at Bank of America all but approve the financing, perform an appraisal, urge the buyer to have the property inspected and surveyed, and then, two days before closing, they kill the deal in underwriting because, and get this, the buyer’s daughter, for whom the buyer receives child-support, is enrolled in a two-year college and not a four-year college. This means that Bank of America allowed child support, for a “child” who is over 18 years-old, to be counted as income on the loan application…. Read the rest of this entry »

In one of my units there are a trio of younger (22-ish) girls who generally are good tenants.

Recently, on a Sunday, I received a call at 8:30pm saying that they have a “real emergency” and to please call them back ASAP.

The “real emergency” turned out to be that they had locked their keys in their car and on that keyring was the key to the house.

They wanted me to drive 45 minutes round-trip to let them into their house. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent note by a reader inspired this post about the role of technology in the landlord business.

When I started in this business I had every intention of leveraging available technology to make the job easier for me and the operation more efficient. I wanted to set up a web site where tenants could communicate with me about maintenance issues and also be able to pay their rent online.

Being that I have a technology background (software engineer) I made certain assumptions about tenants and banks in general which turned out to be wrong. They are listed below:

• Tenants use the internet
• Tenants use banking services
• Tenants WANT an efficient exchange of money and communication
• Banks want to electronically process all transactions

I should say that not all of the above are true all the time but such is the case most of the time. Read the rest of this entry »