Month: March 2007

From time to time, you will have a situation arise where you will have to evict a tenant. The first thing I do is to serve the tenant with a 3 day notice, which is required by our state laws. At that point I fax a copy of the lease and the three day notice to the attorney I use to handle these matters for us.

Sometimes the tenant will make up the back rent within the three day period and the eviction process stops there. Other times you will have to take the eviction process through the court system. I will give you a good piece of advice here. Even if your tenant moves out in the meantime, you need to finish out the eviction process. Otherwise your tenant could just try to move right back into your unit. The other piece of advice I would give you here is that you need to let an attorney handle these evictions for you. They are tedious, time consuming and require proper paperwork. In addition the attorney doesn’t have any emotion involved in the situation like you may. Just let them do their job for you.

It is also clear within the body of my lease that the tenant loses whatever rents or deposits I am holding if I have to evict and that they are liable for any legal or collection costs involved in the eviction process. This makes it easier for you to get a judgment against your tenant. I also follow through with a judgment for damages to the property.

Personally, I always follow through with getting the judgment because I want the eviction to show up on public record. I wouldn’t want another land lord to have to go through whatever I had to go through with this particular tenant.

Running a rental business and having tenants in your properties doesn’t have to be a drudgery. If you follow a few simple steps to insure that things run smoothly, you can have a very successful rental business. For more information on marketing to motivated sellers, exit strategies and running your rental business, visit my website at marketingmagiclady.com.

So now your tenant is all moved into your unit. When a tenant moves into one of my units, I provided for them an inspection sheet which they sign off on stating the condition of the unit, the appliances and so forth. We give our tenants thirty days to go through the unit to see if there are any repairs needed that may have been missed by my rehab crew. These repairs are done at no charge to the tenant. After thirty days, the tenant is charged the first fifty dollars of all repairs. This keeps the tenant from calling us to repair things like toilet guts for instance. We actually added this to our lease after a tenant called us at 6:30 one evening to tell us her kitchen sink was stopped up. It turned out that her small child had stuck a cup down into the garbage disposal. It just needed to be removed. The way my lease reads now, that tenant would be charged a fee of $50.00 to have my repair guy go out for something that wasn’t a repair. This one clause will save you from a lot of unnecessary trips to your units for repairs.

I also have someone who checks my rental units every sixty days or so to make sure they are being cared for properly and that the tenant has not added animals that are not on the lease. We also make sure they have not moved in any more people who are not on the lease. This is grounds for immediate eviction. Within the body of our lease, we also cover how long visitors can stay as well so there is a clear definition as to what a visitor is and what an extra tenant is. You can also hire a property management company to handle your units, but I just feel like our units are better handled by my staff. I also send letters to the neighbors surrounding my rental units letting them know that we are interested in any input they may have about my units and my tenants. They become kind of a watchdog for me to let me know if there are any problems I should know about.

When a repair is necessary, I have my vendor contact the tenant directly to set up a time for the repair. This keeps me out of the middle of the situation. My vendor then calls me to let me know what repairs are needed and to get my authorization to do them. If you build a solid tenant base and your tenants have been in your units for a long period of time, these matters become very easy to handle since your tenants are well aware of your policies regarding repairs. At this point in time, most of my tenants have been in my units for several years. I believe there are two reasons for this longevity. One is that while we are strict with our tenants, we are fair with our tenants. The other is that our tenants know exactly what is expected of them and they live in clean, well maintained units. When they do have a legitimate problem, they know it will be handled expediently.

We also cover what maintenance to the unit the tenant is responsible for. For example, they are responsible for keeping their yard mowed and shrubs trimmed. You could also provide this service for them and charge an extra amount of rent monthly to cover it. Our tenants are responsible for their own utilities as well. We are also very clear as to what is required upon move out, which basically is that the unit looks just like it did when they moved in. We outline the specifics of what we expect to be done, such as the yard being mowed, appliances and carpets cleaned, etc. This just makes it very clear for everyone. Upon move-out, we do an inspection and provide written documentation to our tenants concerning any items we find problems with. We give them a specific timeframe to correct the problems before withholding monies from the security deposit. As I mentioned before, land lording doesn’t have to be that difficult as long you set up a specific plan.

I will discuss the eviction process in the next article or you can check out my website at marketingmagiclady.com for more information on land lording.

I also check out where they were living before by going by the address and checking it out and I talk to their previous land lord. I want to see how they have been treating the place where they were living before. If it looks like a pig pen or if they have multiple animals, this is not someone I want in my unit. If they don’t give me this information on the rental application, I won’t even consider them to rent my unit. I know some of this is just common sense but it bears discussion. If a tenant makes it through my rigorous screening process, I also have them pay first month’s rent, last month’s rent and the security deposit either by cash, cashiers check or by money order. I do not accept personal checks for the move-in amounts.

During the following months I will accept personal checks from them for the rent, but only until such time as they write us a bad check. The first time a check bounces for insufficient funds or any other reason, they must make it good immediately or I will immediately begin the eviction process. Once they bounce a check to me once, from that point on I will only accept money orders or cashiers checks for the rent. This is all covered in the lease they have signed. I also make sure that the person I have putting tenants in units for me thoroughly covers all the items in the lease with them before they sign it.

If a tenant does get their rent to us late, they are responsible for additional rental fees of one percent per day. These fees are in our lease as additional rental fees as opposed to late fees since some courts won’t allow you to get a judgment for late fees. Within the body of our lease we also require our tenants to have renters insurance and I want to see proof of the policy before they move in. This way I can’t be held liable for any injuries or the loss of their possessions due to an accident, fire, hurricane or any other natural disaster.

Additionally, once my tenants sign a lease with me, I will not give them keys until I see proof of utilities in their name for the unit. In certain counties like ours, the land lord can’t turn off utilities in their own name. The only way the name changes on the utilities is with a new lease. This rule may be different where you live, but a lot of the time if the tenant doesn’t pay their utilities it falls back to the land lord. This is just one way for you to protect yourself.

I will be covering more ways for you to successfully manage properties in part three of this article, or for more information on successful land lording, check out my website at marketingmagiclady.com.