The Successful Landlord Blog

Just last week, I had an email exchange with a reader who let me know that after our move to a new web server, a function of the site was not working properly (thanks David.)

He mentioned that he is a tenant and he mostly  reads this blog to gain insight into the mind of a landlord. Wonderful!

I think that in the future, I will be writing more tenant-centric posts along with the landlord-centric ones.

So, without further ado, here goes; 

How To Make Your Landlord Love You:

The landlord-tenant relationship can sometimes be a contentious one. It seems that no matter how friendly the two parties become, the lowest common denominator is that it is a relationship based on mutual trust. Read the rest of this entry »

I feel the need to apologize for not posting as much as I should here on Landlord-Success.com. Recently, I moved a bunch of my web sites to a new virtual private server (VPS) and have been super busy in setting them up and making sure everything works properly.

The company I used for this is called Liquid Web and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed so far. Their support is great and their staff must have an unbelievable amount of patience for seemingly stupid questions.

I mean, I wouldn’t consider myself a novice computer user by any stretch but the administration method I was using before consisted of editing all configuration files by hand and/or writing shell scripts to handle routine tasks.

The new server environment is entirely menu-driven and super easy to use. Hopefully now I’ll have more time to work on posting more. Thanks for your patience! Stay tuned!

So as it’s close to the beginning of the month, I thought it appropriate to write about an interesting tenant behavior. I find it very interesting that when a tenant needs something (a repair, new appliance, etc.) they will call during business hours, often multiple times, just to make sure that they have my attention.

Also interesting is the fact that when a tenant calls to let me know that they will be late with the rent, they more often than not, call after hours and leave a voicemail message.

Why, I wonder, is it SO hard for people to own up to their responsibilities? To talk about it? I mean, it’s not like I’m going to slap them through the phone or anything or even stare them down like the LOL Catz in the picture. In fact, I would venture to say that I have a relatively good relationship with ALL my tenants (currently) and there’s no need for that kind of tactic.

Actually, when tenants behave like that on a regular basis, they are automatically suspect in my eyes. It warrants a few after hours drive-by inspections. It might even warrant an official on-premise inspection it they keep it up.