The Successful Landlord Blog

So you may notice that the header image (above) has changed. I changed it basically because I was getting sick of looking at the original picture every time I logged in to write something, not to mention that it’s a picture of a beach in San Francisco (I think) and not Melbourne Beach, FL where I live.

Then I thought, why not take a bunch of pictures of local scenery and write a little code to rotate the images periodically? Maybe inject a little local flavor into the old landlord blog. Any comments about this? If anyone is super resistant to change, let me know as well and I won’t rotate the images as much.

So, this weekend I realized something that I thought was interesting. Of all the books I’ve read on real estate investing, from what I can remember, none of them approach the subject of what to do, as a landlord, when the rental market goes completely to hell (see picture).

In my opinion, the rental market here in Brevard County, FL is exactly there. Due to investor speculation, there is a huge glut of available properties for rent. So much so that properties of ours that were renting for $950/mth are now renting for below $800/mth.

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So, we have one tenant who, in recent months, has been repeatedly late paying the rent. He does pay the late fees but the excuses that come out of this guy are completely amazing.

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I recently read an interesting story written by Chris Smith over at EquityScout.com about how Google is getting into the real estate business.

Basically it seems that Google is making agreements with larger regional Realtor boards, who usually control the data contained in their regional MLS system, to use and display the property data in their search results. Read the rest of this entry »