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,…
Sitting at the laundromat with my bank account drained So, I learned some very valuable lessons this week at the laundromat. First, laundromat has an “O” in it which is contrary to how I say it — “laundry mat.” Next, the machines there have come a long way since I was kid. They have timers on the washers now, which is awesome, and the dryers are very efficient. I…
A good property management system I have been out working on rentals a lot this past week. Contrary to what you hear about most landlords, I actually like working on our properties. The reason for this is because I get to see how our people are doing, how they are keeping the house up and if they are doing the four jobs of a tenant. And just to…
The Odd One On this episode of What’s The Deal, Joey and Ashley show you how to acquire a rental property via owner financing and then compare and contrast the rehab differences in a rental verses a flip project.
Don’t kill the golden goose I was talking with an investor the other day who had just received some really great news. His portfolio of rental properties had an equity value of over $1 million. I asked him how he found this out, and he told me he’d been working with a financial advisor who had challenged him to find fair market values for each piece of property he…
Cool it, buster When you own rental property, there are a lot of expenses you should plan for. Most people understand making payments on their mortgage and property taxes monthly, but there are sporadic expenses you should be saving for monthly as well. They include things like vacancy and repairs. The savings we set aside for paying these costs is something we call a rental’s “expense factor.” We…
I almost missed it It was about 10:30 on Saturday night. We had just put the kids down, and Ashley and I were preparing for bed. At this point, my beautiful bride was considered full term in her pregnancy at 38 weeks. She lay down in the bed only to pop right back up with a startled look on her face as she said, “Whoa! I just had a…