How about if utilities are in landlord's name and the lease specifies that utilities are responsibility of the landlord?
Oops, the furnace had a transformer burn out about a week into January, and the replacement one has a "lead time" of 2 weeks or a month.
Preferably, the lease specifies that the tenant is not allowed to perform modifications and repairs to items regulated by building or housing-unit-rental codes. (my words).
Furthermore, I have seen leases requiring that tenant must not use a heat source other than landlord-provided heating system for home heating.
My experience in delivery jobs suggests to me that problem tenants disproportionately tend to have a problem with indoor temperature lower than 70's F.
As a code enforcement officer, I suggest to owners that the rental contract identify them (the owner or representative) as the responsible party for the replacement of the HVAC filter. And that they be very clear about that and the other elements of the contract at rental time. On a certain day of the month, at a specific time, the filter will be changed by the owner. (15th of the month, at 7PM). Tenants can be there if they want. And even though checking the smoke detector function is a tenant responsibility, I suggest doing that at the same time as the filter, and being very obvious about the monthly documentation. Satisfies Landlord-Tenant law, and puts the owner/representative in the unit for a condition awareness once a month. And if a prospective tenant balks at the very idea of you doing it instead of them (I have seen incredibly dirty filters), you can count that you may have just dodged that one. Also, be very wary of people that are ready/willing/having to move in months of bad weather. And even if you don't live there, you are still a neighbor. Several owners in my assignment area have a small sign, like twice the size of a business card, on the storm door facing out. That says "If anyone sees problems with grass, trash, or vehicles at this property, call Property Manager at........." If a neighbor knows that the owner is able to be contacted instead of trying to ignore all issues but collecting the rent, my agency is less likely to be getting the complaint.
Careful how you use that. Don't use in private locations. Other caveats apply.
You can't do that. Don't tamper with electric or gas or water. I like cutting off the cable idea though. Also, non paying tenants will not move because of no heat or electric, they will call the housing authority.
Don't let your tenants keep getting away with bad behaviour. If it violates your terms of lease, throw them out sooner than later. Once you cut them slack they will take advantage. Be nice, but very firm.
You may wish to find some company to manage the property for you. They know the ropes and since you will be far away, double so.
I owned and rented a 2 apartment home in the GTA. The basement tenants complained of water dripping from the ceiling in the livingroom area. This was a constant issue for him - not a one off. Upon investigation the east indian family renting upstairs had a tarp on the floor, 2 swimming pools filled which contained rice patties. As well in one of the bedrooms there was what I can only consider to be a commercial deep fryer - no vent / ceiling driipping with grease. This rental agreement indicated 3 people (wife, husband and kid). In one bedroom there was a 3 three teir x 2 of hammocks. Soon after that I got out of the rental business.
Don't know where you will find an area free of natural disasters...if there is one, then man-made disasters probably make up for what nature missed :o) My neighborhood in Florida was largely retirees, of course. When the old folks die off, they tend to be replaced by rather useless children...kids who live off parents tend to jump into inherited property, as opposed to kids who have their own stable life. I guessed that 80% of my neighbors had alcohol and/or drug problems. Numerous trust-fund babies. I have no problem with folks having wealth, but there is a definite group of utterly worthless people who have always lived off their parents and have never made their own way...so, a fancy address doesn't mean they haven't had multiple DUI's (lawyered-up, thanks to mommy and daddy), drug use/selling, etc. Prescription drug use was epidemic, and I believe the county had two or three hundred deaths last year from rx drug od's. I wouldn't buy property anywhere in Florida nowadays. There are still plenty of snow-birds who own condos that are rarely used or are rented short-time...condos with non-resident owners are hell-holes because managing is "not my job".
I moved back to Indiana, and there are some great buys...have looked at a couple of old homes with really great bones that need to be updated. Also lots of small, starter homes. All foreclosures or HUD owned. Just had news of another local layoff of 200 or more people from one of the larger employers, so things aren't fixed yet.
I think employment and housing ref's would be very important, and then trust you gut. I'm thinking if one advertises a rental that it must include that requirement to help avoid discrimination nonsense.
Credit checks cost a little money but can help eliminate bad apples. Actually talking to the previous landlord is important also. They may be reluctant to say anything bad about tenants but you mignt learn something. It is better to leave the place empty for a month or two rather than just grabbing money from the first person who comes along. Beware of people who talk too much or tell you lots of stuff that has nothing to do with your problem. They are often blowing smoke as a distraction.
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Good advice. Credit checks will be a must, but that just weeds out the already bad people, not the ones that are "ripening" on the vine. (-:
So true about distraction. We're thinking of finding someone competent to do their own minor maintenance in exchange for a break on the rent, although there are plenty of good reasons not to do that . . .
I've read all the other responses. The one thing I would recommend is to get in touch with a real estate rental agency. Let them do the selection and take care of the rent collection. They take a percentage of the monthly rent that they set, so the higher the rent, the greater the percentage. You won't have to check on the house occasionally since the agent will do that too. Besides, they are up on the laws.
In Florida, realtors are starving...in our condo, they would rent to ANYONE. The one anyone was an alcoholic woman, with teen daughter, who brought home homeless people to drink with. She trashed a very nice condo..no money to sue her for.
Ask the percentage, before they start filling out the forms. Sometimes, market-dictated rent minus their cut, doesn't leave enough to pay the mortgage and insurance. All depends on how nice the house is, and how short the local rental property supply is for people who don't want to (or can't) buy their own place.
I've known a couple people that did it anyway, out of desperation, and ended up selling the house cheaply a year later, because the place was still costing them money. IMHO, if you can't rent it out for at least, oh, 130% of your fixed expenses, you are better off selling and getting the loss over with (assuming you are not so upside down it would wipe you out, of course.)
You can hire a property management company to handle the rental for you, including dealing with evictions. They will tell you what processes they use to screen renters and show you sample rental agreements. If you'd rather not go that route, you should find some of the online forums for people who invest in and rent out rent properties, such as the SDCIA
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You can join these forums and get advice from experienced landlords.
You will, of course, have to make background checks prospective renters, including credit, criminal histories, rental histories, references. Verify their current employment and income, and confirm their prior rental histories - call the landlord, don't just take the applicant's word for it. It's common for crooked types to give you a fake landlord, usually a friend of theirs - so check the property and confirm with the owner of record that the applicant really had rented from them. If you can, inspect their current home. If it's a dump, you know they'll treat your home the same way.
Do a face-to-face interview and look for anything that raises flags, such as dilated or red eyes, track marks, lying about small things, changing their story, repeated protestations of honesty, failing to answer certain questions. Use your gut instincts. You won't catch them all, but you'll spot some of them.
Put a clause in the agreement outlining who, and only who, is allowed to reside in the home. You don't want a situation where you discover too late that the couple who signed the lease turned it over to their spoiled kid and all his frat buddies, nor do you want lowlifes renting out every square yard in the house to their friends.
If you do have to evict, a strategy suggested by several landlords is to bribe the tenant to leave asap. You and they know they can drag things out, and you don't want them to do any (additional) damage in the meantime. So you phrase it as a service to them: you gotta evict them, but you know it won't be easy for them to find a new place right away. You are willing to "help out" by paying them a relocation fee (usually two-three hundred bucks) to get their stuff out within 24 hours. You will meet them and pay them cash as they vacate. Lowlifes find it hard to resist cash. Don't get worked up about having to pay them to leave when the law's on your side; you have to view the bribe as a cost of business. You're protecting your property from (further) damage.
Right, the biggest reason to NOT ALLOW a tenant to do "minor maintenance" is because you are allowing that person to decide what gets maintained and how it will be repaired...
Might get stuff fixed, but you will often find that the work might not be up to your standards... Too much liability with rentals if substandard work is done and causes a problem later on to not have fully licensed and insured trades workers doing repairs so you are making sure to CYA...
Hey, we're just brainstorming here. While the prospect of a freeloading tenant destroying the house bit by bit while forestalling eviction isn't thrilling, I doubt I'll be implementing anything that can "blow back" on me. There have been a number of good suggestions that I had not thought about, so I'll concede that it's not the way any of this is "supposed" to work, but life in these United States seems to be more a question of "what can I get away with?" than it used to be. If there's something I can do to lessen the chance of being screwed without screwing myself in the process, I'll look into it. I believe it's foolish, however, to get stuck in a situation where a deadbeat not only doesn't pay the rent, but destroys my property in an effort to forestall an eviction.
Well, there are lots of things you never want to get caught at, and if I were to install some sort of remote property protection, I would make sure it was completely legal, and if I couldn't arrange that, then completely undetectable. Hmm, I could see where leaving a copper phone line active could have its advantages, though. Most modern alarm consoles have "listen in" capabilities and it would take a battle of expert witnesses to prove it had been hacked and used as a monitoring device by an unscrupulous tenant. Having intimate access to the property before it's rented means a great deal of ingenuity in placing illegal but useful bugs of every sort in play.
What if they have no heat because they've failed to pay the gas bill and are now running on space heaters (electric if they've still got power - kerosine if they're getting power out of the neighbor's gas tanks at night)?
The power and gas companies do it all the time. Even the water company will shut off service if you don't pay. Why do they get a better deal than a landlord does, the entity with the most $ at risj from a rat tenant?
Even if they had not reimbursed me for the power? How does my insertion into the chain of payers confer fewer rights on me than on the power company? It's a bad idea, I've come to realize, because a vindictive tenant could turn on the heat full blast, open all the windows, leave the fridge door open and run hot water all day and stick me with the bill. But I really wonder what would happen if utilities were passed thru, they failed to pay me and I didn't pay the utilities - and the heat and light got cut off. Obviously it takes a while for a heatless, lightless placed to become condemned - although I wonder if a place CAN be condemned for not having power or gas?
Apparently that's why the deadbeats in the local Section 8 rental make the evening run to the video rental place now. Cutting fun time might move some out, but you can't cut wireless, and that segment is growing.
I would work very hard so that anything I did do wouldn't be seen at all. At least not seen as being connected to me. It's a fine line to tread. I think it was Carleton Sheets that suggested the best way to fet them out is to buy them out. Figure out how much they COULD cost you and offer them a percentage to be gone, gone, gone by X date.
That might be what ends up happening. We might choose to just rent out the basement, as our neighbors who travel a bit have done, and limit our exposure (and provide us a place to stay if we come back for any reason). I guess a little more investigation into the subject is in order. In the meantime, some riot or natural disaster will probably scratch another potential retirement location off our ever-shrinking list.
Yep, that seems to be the way to go for a number of reasons.
I suspect that would put me at risk for paying for all the mink stoles, flat screen TVs and bling the tenant would claim were stolen as a result of my doorectomy. Now if I cleverly planted a solenoid that would cause the door frame to fall free by remote control revealing carefully faked termite damage I could claim they had to leave while the house was being bombed. Nah - too much trouble. (-:
It seems half the hard work of becoming a landlord is finding an air-tight lease that covers every contingency without being so long and onerous that no one would sign it. Fortunately, modern youngun's are used to signing thirty page legalese-infested contracts without reading them, so maybe I'll slide by. (-:
That sounds like an excellent clause considering the sources of ignition my Dad used to find when he was doing forensic engineering work. We literate types don't realize that people without even a HS education don't know about a lot of the things we take for granted. Every year we have several fatal house fires and CO poisonings from just those "other" heat sources you note should be banned by contract. The problem, as I see it, is how does a remote (or even local) landlord know that the tenant has stopped paying his gas bill and is running kerosene heaters or even trash fires in a oil drum?
You're joking, I am sure, but you did remind me of why I bought my first gun and moved from my first apartment. It was a 300 pound guy slamming himself against the front door, breaking a hinge, shouting out "I am going to GET you Joe!" (My name's not Joe, FWIW.) It took the police 30 minutes to respond as I wondered how long the door would hold. The next day I bought a .380 Beretta I nicknamed "Sergeant."
I suppose I could advertise via nym on Craigslist that I looked like Jennifer Lopez and I loved having simulated break-in sex . . . nah, that could backfire in any number of horrible ways . . . (-:
Yes, but they should be shooting themselves in the foot if the utility company itself shut off the gas and power. Then the house might be condemnable and the authorities would be responsible for getting them out. That's something I'll need to find out from the local authorities. What happens if the tenants "go dark?" (or dork, for that matter!)
I suppose that's true. It's a job that might call for being more of a hardass than I can be. I was once a renter and temporarily in some bad financial straits. I tend to be too sympathetic to sob stories.
Yes, it certainly might be good to start with a management company for the first year to see what the potential problems are and to learn the rental ropes.
Is that Greater Toronto or Greater Tehran (two names suggested by Google!)? Wait, I see CA in your email addy so it must be Toronto.
Seriously, though, when I first moved here there were 17 people in a similar house across the road. My house had been inhabited by a family with 11 kids (and ONE bathroom). We have strict limits on the number of occupants in the local housing because it's a college town. The landlord across the way said the toilet bowl kept coming loose from the floor because the tenants, from a third world country, would stand on the rim and squat when they used the toilet. Different cultural norms, I guess.
When I was in college, I worked for the defunct Washington Star as a police reporter. I'd follow cops around with my scanner and camera. I got to see plenty of very low end living situations. I've seen bathtubs used as toilets, zoos with animal feces everywhere, needles, pools of vomit, dead animals, shrines of all sorts, collections of anything you can think of, refrigerators full of dead animals, newspapers stacked to the ceiling. One hoarder that was on the news recently required 7 trucks to carry away the possessions she had acquired over 20 years in one small house.
Yes, renting your house is not for the faint of heart and it seems obvious now that inspections, whether monthly or more, are a necessary "smart move" to prevent the place from turning into a slice of Southeast Asia or worse.
Are you sure about that? I thought you could get charged with housing discrimination if you refuse a Section 8 rental.
An excellent idea. This last case was decided in favor of the landlord BECAUSE the Section 8 law requires a pre-rental inspection by their inspectors. Those records indicated the windows were not broken and the rug was brand new and contradicted the lying tenant's assertions otherwise. An independent 3rd party inspection carried great weight with the judge. I assume it does with most judges/arbitrators.
I've always relied on pictures and video to prove the condition of things I rented or borrowed. It seems like your method is a much greater guarantee of "acceptance" by a judge in landlord/tenant court. Good idea!
I've always done this - with expensive rental tools, when I rented a POD storage unit (now outlawed by the local government!), etc. Cuts down on the "he said/she said" sort of disputes. On the People's Court case that started this ball rolling, the tenant had a few worthless pictures, but it was clear she had also adjusted the date between shots, documenting things that couldn't have happened on those dates. The judge managed to catch it, though. I wonder how many other judges would have.
I think that's excellent advice, Evan. Thanks.
Gack. The six months part I definitely DO NOT LIKE. I'll have to check in with the local housing folks to see how long it takes to get an average eviction and if they have any words of wisdom for me about protecting my rights.
I did computer support for a big DC law firm for 10 years and my dad did forensic investigation work, If there's anything I know, it's how to make a civil case. Everything you've suggested is right on the mark!
I have a very good and knowledgeable neighbor I can depend on for doing some of that. Fortunately, with electronic cameras and the net, you can get a detailed report from half a world away within minutes. There's certainly a lot to think about before becoming a landlord.
Yes, in watching these cases play out on TV, it's clear that once a tenancy has been established, even tenuously, all sorts of "protections" for the tenant come into play.
Yes, I would assume the thought of losing $1,000 makes even the most determined house trasher stop and think whether it's worth it. The AC breaker idea is an interesting one, and since it's outside the house, I wouldn't have to enter to deactivate it. I'll keep that in mind.
It's in Maryland, just outside of DC, so there's potential for vacation rentals as it's close to the Metrorail. Unfortunately, from what I've been able to tell from the County website, they are oriented toward tenant, not landlord, protection. It may turn out that the political climate is just so unfavorable to landlords that we'll either get a house sitter or leave it empty as we travel.
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