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Powered by LifeTypeHeather and I spent several days over the last week at our old house, cleaning and fixing various things that our previous tenants broke.
It is pretty annoying to have people totally not care about your property, and live in pretty disgusting conditions, presumably to get back at me for asking them to leave. They hadn't cleaned in a month or two, and it is hard to believe that they were actually eating food off the counters and table, etc.
They also busted in the frames of the exterior doors (one of the tenants had a boyfriend who she didn't get along with all that well, so continual fights and police being called, etc.)
The frames are now fixed, a window replaced, and most of the cleaning done, and so the house is more liveable now. I am not sure how they got a landlord to take them into a new place, without checking their references.
We are now in the process of looking for new tenants, and have a couple possibilities, one of which would be really great - I just need to convince them to move in.
We also took this opportunity of an empty house to have the furnace repaired, which ended up being a pretty easy fix - I was afraid it was going to be more involved than just replacing the burners. It turns out that the burners haven't ever been working properly since we moved into the house seven years ago, as the flames have never looked as nice as they do now. They have been leaking gas to the outside of the house for the last year or so, and recently it got a lot worse. I didn't have a furnace guy (besides the one who came before and charged us to fix everything except the furnace that he was supposed to) to call, so hadn't gotten around to it until a neighbor recommended Caruso Heating. They turned out to be great! They found the part for $100 less than I could find it online (as opposed to the last furnace company, who charged hundreds of dollars more than I could find with a quick search online), and so their materials cost plus labor was equal to what I would have paid online for just the part. He showed up at the time he said he would, and had the furnace fixed in a couple hours or so.
I certainly hope your good possibility works out. And is boyfriend-free.
So much for their promise to come back and clean. What's bizarre is that they seemed to have been caring well for the house until the end. Our tenants protested our temerity in moving back into our own house by skipping out on the last month's rent. Still, renting seems to work for a lot of people. Perhaps you do have to take the attitude of one of our friends, and think like a businessman rather than a homeowner—you can't care about the house and must be willing to charge enough to cover renovation between tenants. I don't think I could ever not care, though.
Our landlord in Massachusetts must have been thrilled with us. It never occurred to us not to take better care of the house because it was not our own.
Re: your last sentence. I was talking to some friends the other day about that. It's been bred in me to take better care of others' things than your own, and it seems that most people don't have that conviction.
Y don't you just rent month to month so that if there's any problem, you can get rid of it easily?
Landlords usually get advised to insist on long leases but IMO, problems like you had make that a bad idea. The assumption is that you can screen bad people out but I don't think you can.
I suppose it depends on state law also, but month 2 month puts you in the best legal position to get rid of problem tenants quickly.
Yes, that is what we did. And if I were meaner, I would have kicked them out in the legal 15 days, rather than letting them have some time to find a place (and destroy our house).
And yes, when I talked to the magistrate's secretary, she said that there wouldn't be any issues in getting a judgement against them and a police officer to escort them out if they refused to leave (which looked like the case for a little bit). Her primary reason for saying that was due to the month to month lease.
A longer lease is nice in terms of not having to find tenants as often, but if you expect there to be trouble, it is much better to have a short lease - if someone has a year lease, you can't start the eviction process for 3 months, and then it takes another month for legal things (and longer if the tenants are willing to pay for a lawyer who can ask for extensions, etc).
We took some pictures of the stuff they did - we didn't take pictures of the dirt and grime - this is a family friendly blog after all...
Is there some reason you don't just sell the place? I think you have more important things to deal with in your life than this stuff.
Also, to me it looks like what they did might still be covered by a month's security. Is that not the case? You're a handy guy so you can save on labor. :-P In fact, if you don't have some way of basically paying wholesale or less on repairs/remodeling, then landlording probably isn't for you.
Yeah, I debate about it some.
I gather that now isn't the best time to sell houses - with people not being able to get mortgages.
Costs ended up alright. They didn't pay the water bill ever, so that was $300 (they use a LOT of water), and in Pittsburgh, the water goes on the owner's credit report if the tenants don't pay.
I haven't looked up the exact costs for what we spent fixing up Carroll, but I don't think it was that much. There is still some cleaning to do. And also, I would have to count my (and Heather's, and a couple friend's) time as $0/hour.
But, they paid for almost four full months of rent, so it was still a good thing from a financial standpoint.
I think the emotional part makes it hard.
As for wholesale things - I don't have any source for that sort of thing, other than doing most work myself.
I'd just like to find a good tenant where repairs aren't required.
None of my landlords (5 years worth) ever had to deal with repairs. I guess both houses had some leaky roof issues, but they were relatively easy to fix (or ignore) and that wasn't due to anything that we did.
True, this is a bad time to sell but I would consider any loss you take as part of selling the house to be a cost of having a family and/or wanting to upgrade your crib.
I would ask yourself whether you want to be a landlord or not and if not I'd sell. If you don't think being Bob Villa by remodeling and repairing your rental is fun, why be a landlord? Money? You could probably make just as much by spending more time at work and buying CDs. You'd be more liquid too.
You forget I'm self-employed, so I can't really "spend more time at work", at least not exactly.
I do like working on houses - the unexpected repairs (particularly when the tenant said there wasn't anything wrong) are not as fun.
I don't forget you are self employed. As a self employed person, I presume you can always work more as opposed to a w2 employee who wont get paid for working more hours.
If you like working on houses then you should view broken stuff as opportunities to have fun then.
Yeah, I guess it sort of works both ways. If you've seen those time-graphs I post every once in a while, the majority of my work is not hourly. I do have some work I could be doing for hourly pay that I've been procrastinating on, but not a lot.