The Successful Landlord Blog

So, back in August of last year, in the heat of summer, a tenant called to let me know that their air conditioning system was not working. I called a very well known (read: big) local HVAC company to attend to the problem.

Basically, due to a recent tropical storm, this company was behind with their service calls and sent out an incompetent technician who came out to the property at the very end of the day, misdiagnosed the problem, added freon and promptly left.

The next day I called to let the company know that their guy didn’t fix the problem. They promised to send someone else out who, arrived at the very end of the day, properly diagnosed (but did not fix) the problem and again, promptly left.

The following day, a Friday, I again called the company who let me know that they were backed up on service calls and they would not be able to come out until Tuesday, due to the Labor Day weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had to write this post due to the almost daily bad stories I hear involving Wells Fargo’s business practices. Here are two stories from two different perspectives:

The first story is from a real estate agent who, in trying to submit an offer to Wells Fargo for a short-sale encountered utter incompetence on the part of Wells Fargo “work-out department” as they call themselves.

Imagine trying to submit a three-page document to a company which they say is required for a deal to close. You send the fax and then call to verify that the document was received. The person you are faxing says they did not get the fax. You fax it again a couple more times and now they say that they only got two of the three pages in the fax which, by the way, each time you received a successful fax-log report. Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s just a quick and interesting note on the inspections I did the other day. I sent out a letter to all my tenants a week in advance notifying them of the inspection. The day they got the letter, a few of them called to inquire why I wanted to inspect. It seems they thought I was “targeting them” personally with an inspection and they wanted to know why.

I let them know that all my tenants got the same letter. (Note to self: don’t personalize inspection letters so well using Openoffice mail merge) Also that these inspections are to become a semi-regular occurrence and that I’m not looking for messy bedrooms or dishes in the kitchen sink but holes in the walls and filthy A/C filters.

The interesting thing was that most of the tenants were home on a Thursday at 1:00pm. Work much people? And they were all chatty with me. Not in a bullshitting-kiss-up kind of way but in a genuine kind of way. One tenant, I even spoke with for 45 minutes. She had just taken a trip and she was telling me about it.

In the end, I found a few maintenance items that needed to be taken care of and I think the tenants were happy about that. They also saw that it was just a quick once-over inspection and I was not about invading their privacy.