[quote=briansd1]My experience it that the most important part of rental is the quality of the tenant.
I’ve gotten good at screening tenants.
You want tenants who will pay on time without being asked. And you want tenants who are well-educated, refined (vs. gross). Those tenants are likely to keep your place clean and tidy. They won’t bang up everything in the house and cause repairs.
Let me give you one simple example: I had one slob of a tenant who did not know how to properly use the front load washer. You have the clean hair and lint off of the glass door so that the rubber seals properly against the glass. Otherwise you have small leaks.
Some people can live 15 years in a house without it ever needing a repaint. Other people are so dirty that the house has to be repainted after 2 years.
I have a zero tolerance policy. No eviction record, no bad-credit, no pets, no smoking, etc…[/quote]
Brian also serious question….
Can you give me examples of how you ask your prospective tenants about some sensitive topics?
I mean, it’s not exactly you can say, “I don’t want to rent to you because you’re a slob….” So what exactly do you do?
I’ve tried to employ a different technique myself, which I found sometimes works sometimes doesn’t. As part of a tenant agreement, I try to include in a clause that says “tenant pays first $70-85(depending on market area) for each service repair call and tenant pays for all block drain service calls” and lower the rent slightly versus market rate…
In the past (in bay area), I explain to the tenant the reason for this is as follows. I don’t want to be bothered with small things, and I want you to take good are of things that are new or completely working before I turned them over to you. That way, I hope to not be pestered with small items like the smoke detector is beeping because it needs a new battery, or a light bulb blew out, or a towel rack fell off… Or you would think twice about pouring sand down a garbage disposal…
For things like dishwasher,dryer,garbage disposal broke, I would either pick up the tab completely out of goodwill if i felt it really was a mechanical failure out of the tenant’s control…OR if the tenant really did abuse the hell out of the appliance, I’d politely tell him the reason why your garbage disposal broke is because you threw a spoon down there…Then I pointed him to the rental agreement about the 70-$80 deductible, which hopefully was enough financial pain for him such that it would discourage careless and abusive behavior… Not sure if this worked all the time or not…
My other question is back to your example of the washer leaking….What motivated you to gvie the person a more complicated front/loading appliance that requires more TLC than a basic appliance in the first place? That is, if I was going to rent out a car to people who I can assume wouldn’t be taking care of things in their best interest, it would be a no frills econ car, not a BMW that requires TLC…So….
In this situation, wouldn’t you just avoid the issue completely, but just furnishing a low end, 3 cycle, top loading washer without absolutely no electronics…You know something that was the bare minimum that was really hard to fvck up, even if the person was a complete moron????
I mean, I guess I’m being a little paranoid here. But I have two ceiling fans in two rooms…I recently removed them, because I couldn’t get replacement remotes. I contemplated replacing them with more ceiling fans…But opted out for two reasons.
1) If they break, I’m on the hook for fixing them. Plus, what if for some reason they get injured on them (god knows how).
2) They aren’t going to miss them, and they can bring in floor lamps themselves…
I’m not trying to judge here. Just trying to learn what would folks do in situation X, and what might be an alternative less PITA way of dealing with stuff….for my own benefit of course.
