The Successful Landlord Blog

So the other day something occurred to me: It seems that where you advertise your vacant rental property can determine the “quality” of potential tenants.

I have found that with the past few vacancies, listing the property in the local Multiple Listing Service (MLS) seems to bring usually qualified, seemingly serious potential tenants with a decidedly lower “dirtbag” quotient.

It seems that when potential tenants show up with a Realtor in tow, they somehow had to convince said Realtor to work with them in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

So, recently I had a tenant who had been paying his rent late consistently for the last 4 months. Last month, on the 3rd, which is the day before rent is considered late, I received an email from him saying that he will be paying the rent including all late fees on the 24th.

I immediately replied to his email asking if he will be sending next month’s rent as well since it will be due 5 days later. Of course, I received no reply.

In the middle of the month, I received another email from the tenant explaining that he has come into some difficulty with his job and that he thinks that it’s in everyone’s best interest for him to move out since he can no longer afford to pay the rent. He assured me that he would be out by the first of the month. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »