The Successful Landlord Blog

For a while there I was totally freaking out due to the fact that it looked like I was going to have two maybe three properties vacant and one time. With that big sucking sound coming from the economy as a whole, this would not be a good thing at all.

As it turned out one, of the vacant rentals was snapped up pretty quickly, the existing tenants in another one renewed their lease (yay!) and that left the one which needed to be totally cleaned out after the most recent eviction.

The aforementioned rental is now ready, thanks to a needy neighbor and the $600 I paid him to do the work. Soon after this was done, an acquaintance called to ask if I had any houses for rent because her daughter was looking for a place. I let her know the address of the vacant rental and told her to have the daughter call me for details. Read the rest of this entry »

So, remember the latest eviction story? Well, it’s FINALLY over and done. At the court hearing, the judge ruled that if the tenant deposited $300 with the court, she could stay another two weeks until school was finished for the summer so as not to disrupt the kids lives so much.

Well, she failed to deposit the money with the court and the judge failed to issue the eviction. I had to send no less than three emails and nothing happened until I sent the one below.

I really don’t see why it was necessary for me to have to go to these lengths to get an “official” ruling from the court but, in any case, Enjoy!

Dear Judge <name deleted>,

RE: Case no. <deleted>

I am the plaintiff in the above referenced case and this will be the third time I am writing to you about this matter. Read the rest of this entry »

So this is just a quick note to say that the eviction process that started in this post, has STILL not resolved itself. Some 50 days later, the deadbeat tenant is STILL occupying the property. I decided to not make another post about this situation until it’s resolved.

The bad thing is that I’m on my way out of town to do some work for my day job. Because my name is on all the eviction papers, I’m pretty sure that I have to be on-site at the rental to actually take back possession. So that’ll have to wait until I return.

Stay tuned for a complete post including the letter I had to write to the judge all but pleading (no pun intended) him to uphold my rights as a landlord.

…and I thought this business was going to be cut-and-dry because the behavior of all parties involved is written in the state law. Ya. No!

Recently I started using a nifty service called GrandCentral.com to shield my cell phone number from tenants. In the past, I used to have to set my phone to not send my called-id information but then sometimes a problem would occur when the person receiving the call chose not to receive calls with a “private number.”

GrandCentral is a great solution because you can specify the greeting that certain callers hear and also you can choose to route certain callers to certain phones. For instance: Read the rest of this entry »