Writ of possession I meet with a tired landlord recently at a property where they’d just finished the eviction process. And this person said multiple times during our meeting that they never wanted to be a landlord ever again. The reason for this was the tenants owed the landlord quit a bit of money. Months prior to the eviction, one of the tenants had moved out. Because of…
To be, or not be free and clear I come from the Dave Ramsey school of thought when it comes to managing finances. I don’t like personal debt, and I prefer to pay cash for things. As a matter of fact, Ashley and I have never had a car payment during our marriage. We no longer have any student loan debt, and we only use our personal credit cards…
Going on an adventure We just got back from driving an RV across the United States to see the Grand Canyon in Arizona. And it was awesome. We rented a 30-foot class C motor home to take us on our journey. When it got delivered, the whole family excitedly piled in to check out the new ride. You should have seen the looks on my kids faces. …
Rental Application Procedure The way we take rental applications has changed over time. When we first started, we would take lots of pictures, a video tour and then upload all that material to a website that we could advertise on for free that would also syndicate to other sites like Zillow and Trulia. We would then put hand-painted red signs in the yard of the property listing all the…
You have to go inside the house My sister and her three kids are moving cross country — and I mean literally from one coast to the other. On the fifth day of their long car trip, they finally made it to Georgia and stopped in to spend the night at our house for some family time and a much-needed reprieve from hotel rooms and restaurant food. We…
Passive income equals freedom I was sitting on a plane recently getting ready to take the longest flight I have ever been on. It was from Atlanta to Portland, and it was going to take 5 1/2 hours. And I was wondering what I was going to do with myself for that long. When I boarded the plane, I was a little taken aback. It was huge. A…
Tenant at will Well, I recently found myself in court with an inherited tenant. When I say inherited, I mean the tenant was in place when we bought the property. Our problem was not because of nonpayment but instead because of an unruly dog. Now, I like dogs. And our company is pet friendly. But when I did the inspection on the house, I could see this animal…
Explaining the four jobs of a tenant I’ve written to you many times about how we “hire” people to do the four jobs of a tenant. And I’ve said those fours jobs are the standard by which we choose our tenants and also how we decide to “fire” them when they’re not performing. And just to remind you, the four jobs are: 1. Take care of the house….
Train, train and retrain your tenants I tend to be an open book, especially when I mess up, because it holds me accountable and helps me to learn from mistakes. So, with that fact in mind, I’m going to tell you about something I messed up on with a rental, and then, I’ll tell you how we remedied it. I got a little lax with doing inspections…
Do you take pride in your rentals? As I’ve told you before, I like doing service calls on our rentals. One of the big reasons for this is I get to see how our tenants are keeping the properties. We pride ourselves on good customer service, which includes a fast response time on service calls. So when something breaks, I’m often there within a few hours. As such,…