Kathy Kennebrook believes that learning how to manage your rental properties as a Real Estate Investor is instrumental to the success and profitability of your income properties.
As a Real Estate Investor you don’t have to hire a property management company to manage your rentals unless you really want to. You can manage them yourself easily if you set down some specific rules for your tenants and your business.
The first rule is that you don’t bend the rules. This was a tough one learned by the school of hard knocks for Kathy Kennebrook. She used to get “sucked in†by all of her tenant’s excuses, which obviously caused her a lot of stress. Kathy Kennebrook knew that she had to make some changes quickly if she wanted her rental business to succeed.
Kathy Kennebrook finally figured out that if the tenant wasn’t paying their rent, she had to come out of pocket to pay the mortgage. She quickly realized that these tenants were in effect stealing from her. So Kathy Kennebrook got tough, no more excuses were acceptable. Tenants have a responsibility to pay their rent. So when rent wasn’t in Kathy Kennebrook’s post office box on the day they were due, the tenant was served immediately with a 3 day notice or notice to quit. In the state of Florida, you can charge a fee to serve this notice on top of the past due rent and Kathy Kennebrook added that amount to what was past due. She also had her handyman deliver the notice.
Kathy Kennebrook then hired a really good attorney to handle the rest of the eviction process for her. She quickly learned that this was the easiest way to deal with evictions and the most stress free. This brings us to Rule number 2, which is that tenants mail their rent to a specific address every month. DO NOT pick up rents from tenants! It is the tenant’s responsibility to make sure the rent gets to you and gets to you on time. Kathy Kennebrook cuts no slack for holidays or weekends either. Rents are also due before the last day of the month so Kathy Kennebrook has the money in hand to make her mortgage payments on time.
All of Kathy Kennebrook’s “rules†are laid out in an airtight lease she developed from the very beginning which outlines everything she expects from her tenants and what they can expect from her.
Rule number 3 is that Kathy Kennebrook also charges late fees for each day the rent is late. Within the body of the lease, these late fees are actually called “additional rent†because otherwise the courts don’t recognize them as a compensable expense.
Find out more about managing your rental properties in Kathy’s next article. For more information on managing your rental properties and finding all the sellers and buyers you need for your real estate investing business, visit Kathy Kennebrook’s website at marketingmagiclady.com.
