The Successful Landlord Blog

Keeping records for a business is usually a must what with draconian government agencies like the US Internal Revenue Service constantly breathing down our collective necks. However, record keeping becomes a necessity for other reasons as well.

Recently, I had a tenant contact me to tell me that her ex-husband had temporarily stopped paying her child support due to an injury and please could she pay the rent late including late fees. I agreed.

Two months down the road, I expected an amount including current month’s rent and late fees for the last two months. Well I received an amount, but it was short. It was less than $100 short but still, no explanation followed. This seems to be happening a lot recently with certain tenants. They will send in an amount that is less than the amount they owe and wait to see what I do about it. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read a blog post about enabling tenants to interact with you, the landlord, in a ’self service’ sort of way. This blog post espoused the benefits (cost and otherwise) of providing tenants more than one way to make contact in order to place a maintenance request, for instance.

The blog post suggests a scenario where the the tenant logs into a web site where she places a maintenance request and is updated every step of the way during the maintenance process (processing, scheduling, completion, etc.) via email thereby eliminating phone calls which are, according to the blog post, more expensive to process.

This idea sounds really good in theory but I seriously doubt that it works very well in practice. In my experience, tenants feel more confident that you got the message when they’ve left a phone message. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, while having lunch with an old friend, we had a discussion about the merits of buying condo units as a real estate rental investment. Having been a condo owner in the past, I can positively say that I will never do that again.

This subject could easily fill a book, so here are my reasons in bullet-point form:

• Too many complaints from neighbors. Tenants usually only sign a year lease so if they annoy their neighbors, they can simply move. The neighbors then transfer their frustration and annoyance to the landlord.
• Condo Associations. If you like to invest by committee, condos are for you. Don’t want to afford that fat assessment to resurface the parking lot right now? Too bad. Pay up.
• Condo Commandos. These people are usually retired and have nothing to do all day. Nothing, except get all up in your business that is. They feel that you as a landlord are devaluing their property by renting your unit and they won’t let you forget it. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy New Year readers! Things have been here slow here at Landlord-Success.com recently, hence the lack of posts. But, with a new year comes new ambitions. So here’s a new post for your reading enjoyment.

Recently I heard the following story about a hapless landlord who found himself in a pickle because for some reason he did not collect a security deposit from a tenant.

As a preface to this story, I should mention that here in Melbourne, FL there seems to be an unwritten rule about the landlord-tenant relationship. It is virtually impossible to collect first month’s rent, last month’s rent AND a security deposit. I have no idea why that is but normally, only two of the above are collected.

So, back to Mr Hapless who owns a single-family home which is occupied by a tenant. He decides that he has had enough of this landlording nonsense and decides to sell his investment. Everything goes normally with the sale up to the point of having the property inspected by the potential buyer. Read the rest of this entry »