The Successful Landlord Blog

In one of my units there are a trio of younger (22-ish) girls who generally are good tenants.

Recently, on a Sunday, I received a call at 8:30pm saying that they have a “real emergency” and to please call them back ASAP.

The “real emergency” turned out to be that they had locked their keys in their car and on that keyring was the key to the house.

They wanted me to drive 45 minutes round-trip to let them into their house. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

So this weekend, bright and early on Saturday morning, I got a very frantic call from a tenant who said that they awoke to find that the their air conditioning system had failed and it was F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G in the house.

About a half hour later, I got another call from the same tenant urgently asking that I get back to him ASAP because, again, their A/C was not working and they couldn’t heat the house.

I called him back soon after and promised that I would get someone out there as soon as I could. The HVAC company went out to the property, fixed the problem and all was well.

Read the rest of this entry »