Dealing With Tenants

Dealing With Tenants
06-23-08

Unless you hire a property manager, one of your biggest responsibilities as a landlord will be dealing with tenants. As with any situation involving people, you will have the expected and the unexpected occur. Giving some serious thought to the various possibilities ahead of time will better equip you to deal with whichever option happens to be the case on any given day.

There are three major areas regarding tenant relationships. You'll want to make sure you are thoroughly familiar with the ups and downs of all three.

Rent
Your tenants sign a lease outlining how much money they are supposed to pay and how often they are supposed to pay it. But, as you can imagine, things don't always go according to schedule. There may be times when you actually end up being more of a collection agecy than a landlord. This can be annoying, but it comes with the territory. Actually, if you do your research and check out your tenants carefully before letting them move in, you should be able to avoid people who are not going to pay what they owe on time.

Repairs
Since your tenants are paying money to stay in your property, they are going to expect everything to be in good working order. If nothing ever breaks, you won't have to worry about this. But guess what? The moment something goes wrong, you'll be receiving an urgent phone call from your tenant, expecting an immediate response. If you are pretty handy yourself and know what you are doing, you may be able to fix the problem on your own. But in many cases, this will require paying someone else to do the work. Just make sure that you have money set aside to be able to deal with these kinds of emergencies when they happen.

Lawsuits
Even though you may hate to think about it, some tenants will try to take you to court if something goes wrong. This is far from common, but sometimes small disputes can lead to larger issues that can only be settled in court. One of the best ways to prevent this is to do your best to keep your tenants happy at all times. This doesn't mean that you should let them push you around, but a mutually beneficial relationship will go a long way in ensuring that your problems never go beyond anything minor.

Don't let the prospect of dealing with bad tenants scare you away from investing in single family homes. When it comes down to it, the majority of the tenants end up working out just fine. But, of course, there are exceptions and you have to be prepared to deal with them.

Developing quality relationships with your tenants is really the key. When you treat people respectfully and fairly, they usually appreciate it and tend to treat you the same way in return. And when both parties feel good about the relationship, the lower the risk of having unresolvable issues.

Mark E. Moebius
Miljonair Homes
Custom home builder St. Louis
3451 St. Albans Rd.
St. Albans, MO 63073
636.300.9000