The Successful Landlord Blog

For a while now I have been unhappy with one of the three lawn service companies that we use to maintain the yards of the rental houses.

This lawn service in particular is the worst at customer service not to mention they do a completely half-assed job. Case in point, I drove by the property one time and they had not weed-whacked the grass next to the house in so long that the grass was about three feet high and growing up the side of the house.

When I call to complain, they do not return calls and sometimes, only sometimes, do they actually remedy the problem. Not to mention, the owner, who actually works on the crew, has never so much as come to the door to introduce himself after he bought the lawn service business from my old lawn guy.
If I need to communicate with him, it’s usually by mail and there is no response. If he needs to communicate with his customers he does the following:

If he needs to change his contact phone number (what’s the point?), he will change it on the bill heading and not take the time to write a note or highlight the fact that the number has changed.

If he wants to let his customers know to write checks to him personally rather then to the business name, he has a rubber stamp made and stamps all the invoices before they go out.

There’s something to be said for doing a little public relations sometimes. For instance, in my other job, I do most of my work remotely. My customers are about 100 miles away on average. Yet, about every couple of months, I find a way to stop in to their offices so that they can see my face and interact with me on a personal level. It’s just so that they know who they’re sending their checks to. It makes them feel warm and fuzzy (I think) to see me every so often and so far, it’s worked out OK.

This post is going to be kind of technology heavy so if you’re not so inclined, you can stop reading now. I won’t be offended, believe me.
Anyway, in the past I’ve had problems with tenants who seem to think that it’s OK for them to call my cell phone at all hours of the day and night. They probably do this because they think that my cell phone is the most direct route to contact me and they would like an answer to their question or problem RIGHT NOW. Never mind that they can’t seem to “remember” that at the beginning of the month, rent is due and when I call to find out where it is, they are no where to be found, but no, they want a response RIGHT NOW, so….

I might mention by-the-way that I NEVER give tenants or contractors my cell phone number but sometimes I forget to change the setting on my phone so that it displays “Private Caller” on their caller-id display and so they think that they are being “assertive” by calling my cell phone. I have an office number for them to call which pages me immediately and I call them back….usually immediately.

Case in point, I used to own a seasonal rental house near the beach a few years ago. A  woman who rented the house for about two months was a little bit of a kook. Something about needing her 3 Labrador Retrievers with her because they “help her write” some book that she was writing. Whatever. She proceeded to call me on my cell phone at 11:00pm on a Saturday night (while I was out at a restaurant no less) to ask me how to use the VCR (!!!) WTF!?

Anyway, I recently started using a free software package called Asterisk. Asterisk will turn an old computer that you may have laying around into a free private-branch exchange (PBX). It can behave like a simple office phone system but it can also give you the ability to “appear” to be calling from somewhere (the office) when you’re really placing the call from elsewhere (your cell phone).

It’s really neat! In addition to this functionality, you can also set it up to forward calls from a certain number to something called a softphone which is basically a piece of software which behaves like a phone.

Theoretically, you could be anywhere in the world and attached to the internet, where you could receive and place calls from a number local to the caller.

So, we have a single-family rental house which is vacant after I had to evict a couple of real idiot tenants.

There is quite a severe glut of properties (especially single-family homes) for rent in the area. I have tried advertising in the lame local paper and in the cool free local paper but seem to get very little response. I have also placed a rental listing in the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS).

The reason for the abundance of rental properties in the area is the fact that when the national real-estate market was booming, many investors bought pre-construction homes hoping to sell them for a profit after they were built. Well, now typically they can’t sell them for what they paid. As a result, a whole bunch of them are for rent.

I honestly feel for these new landlords because when the tenants who moved in either trash the house or at best leave it a big mess, they will have to put in even more money to make it salable again.

In fact, one of the idiot tenants who moved out of our rental which is now vacant, moved in to one of these places. I never so much as got a call from the new landlord to check references which usually means they were desperate to get tenants in there.