Quote:
Originally Posted by battagd1
Best tip I can give you is to be very selective when you pick your tenants. They are the key to success.
I charge then for background check! If they don't want to pay for it, they are not good tenants.
If they have moved a ton of times, they may not be good tenants.
If they have filed backuptcy they are not good tenants.
If their car is a mess, they are not good tenants.
Charge them a deposit of one month rent and tell them that half of it is not refundable, if they don't like that they are not good tenants.
Get a home warranty on the property. Best $500/yr you will ever spend. AHS is a good company to use. When something breaks you pay $75 and they cover the rest. Thus will keep your cost and risk down.
PM me if you have more questions
I largely agree with what he says, just not the deposit part. Ask for a deposit of one month rent. If there is no damage, give it back to them. If something is broken, then you get to take something out of the security deposit. Cleaning after the tenant moves out is standard cost of doing business and not to be taken out of the cleaning deposit. I have had tenants be careful to keep the place in good condition so they would get their deposit back.
Find out what the laws about security deposits are for your location. For example, we are required to notify our tenants within 2 weeks of their departure if we plan to take anything out of their security deposit. We have to tell what the money is being taken for. They have a period of time to contest it. And, we have to give them their security deposit back within a certain amount of time. If not, we have to give them back the whole security deposit. In some places, you can be required to give them 2-3x the deposit. Know what is required of you and do it.
There are very few perfect tenants. We don't disqualify someone because they have had credit issues. We disqualify them if they are not fixing those credit issues. Our units are in a good location, well maintained and not cheap. But, basically everyone we have gotten an application from has had credit issues. As long as the issues weren't too bad and they have been cleaning up credit issues, we will consider them as a tenant.
We are not able to run the tenant's credit report. I don't remember the exact reason for this. We just have them bring us a copy of their credit report from one of the bureaus. We look at the accounts that they have had issues with and the trend over time. Anyone who balks at taking 10 minutes to get a copy of their credit report and print it out is not someone we want to rent to.
Don't let little problems become big problems. If you happen to notice something that isn't quite right, then fix it right away.
Do not let the tenant get away with being late for rent. If you do, it will get worse. We let it slide one time and we probably shouldn't do that. If we don't have the rent by the end of the 3 day grace period, we send them in writing that we will be enforcing late payment penalties if it happens again. We are flexible though. If someone who has reliably been paying on time tells me that they forgot to pay before they left town and they will be happy to pay it when they get back in a few days, I don't enforce any late payment penalty. As long as I know there is a legit reason for being late and they will pay, then I'm fine with it.
When we rented, we thought it was stupid that one of our landlords gave us a bank account number where we could go deposit our rent. We have found that most of our renters prefer that instead of writing a check. I have offered other payment options as well, but the most popular options seems to be them depositing the cash/check. I can't explain it.