The Successful Landlord Blog

Recently, I was changing the locks on one of the rental houses because of this idiot and came across a new (to me) product by Kwikset called SmartKey^®.

Basically, it’s a lock which can be “programmed” to recognize a new key and forget the old one. Hallelujah! No more changing locksets! And it’s about freaking time too.

A while back, I wrote about something similar where instead of changing the whole lockset, you just change the actual lock cylinder. But these lock cylinders had to be special ordered and you had to keep the keys together with the locks.

Now, with this SmartKey system, you just have to keep track of the keys themselves. In case I’ve been living in The Whitehouse under a rock, if you’ve heard of these locks, leave me a comment and tell me to wake up and pay attention. Cheers!

This post was inspired by Cliff over at ChangingMyDirection.com who recently made a post about American Home Shield and why they don’t do their job and/or are lame in general.

My experience with companies like this is not far off the mark from Cliff’s experience. In this arena, my favorite company to hate is East Coast Mechanical or ECM as they like to call themselves. Their service area includes the lower half of Florida’s east coast and are based in Boynton Beach, FL.

I should mention that my experience was a while back when I owned some vacation rental property in Florida which sat empty most of there year due to the hot weather south Florida is known for.

At the time, I was living WAY out of town in Anchorage, Alaska (a whole other story) and was in need of a company to do repairs on the major appliances should something stop functioning while a tenant was in residence. Sure enough, the washing machine failed mostly because it was about 20-years old, but then that’s what mechanical insurance is for, right? Wrong! Not when you buy it from East Coast Mechanical.

First off, these jokers would come out and ring the doorbell, decide that no one was home and not bother to call anyone to let them know. This is after I had informed their customer service people that the property was vacant and the technician would have to drive a big THREE BLOCKS to get the key in order to gain access. But no, they couldn’t wrap their heads around that one.

Then, when they finally get access to the property, they said that they would have to order a part and the whole show-up-and-find-the-unit-unoccupied-then-leave game began again.

Finally, I figured that these idiots clearly did not intend to uphold their end of the contract and decided to cancel whereupon I was informed that even though ECM did not perform as advertised, I was not entitled to a refund of the remaining insurance premium. WTF?!

I mean, COME ON. I’m sure that not all companies in this industry behave like this but the more I hear these stories, the more I am convinced that this is the norm.

Also, I asked a Realtor I know about American Home Shield and she mentioned that she uses AHS because they have a partnership agreement with Re/Max. I guess at times, a warranty like this just helps the deal to go through….as long as you never have to use it.

So, here’s a good one. I’ve had these tenants who for the third time in a year, yesterday called me at 8:30pm (no less) to say that their toilets were backing up (again). I know, a landlord’s dream, right?

The last time they called about this, I had to make an emergency (read: $$$) call to a plumber to come and snake the waste line from the roof because there was no (visible) clean-out installed. The plumber who came out reported that when he brought the snake back up out of the line, a bunch of tampons came up with it. (nice) Read the rest of this entry »

So, as I’ve mentioned in the past, Florida residents are getting royally ripped off by the property insurance companies.

Here’s a synopsis:

First the insurance companies decide that we are too likely to be hit by hurricanes and so they jack up the premiums. When the homeowners complain to the insurance companies, they don’t listen.

So then the homeowners complain to the state government since insurance is regulated by the state. Many insurance companies decide that they will not insure anything which is not owner occupied. No problem, we have Citizens Property Insurance which is the state owned “insurer of last resort.” yay. Read the rest of this entry »