Being a landlord Part II

Something else I forgot to mention when trying to rent out your property...ask to be involved in every step of finding renters. Demand to be at the house when people walk through. Even if you walk out the door as they are walking in. You want to know what type of people are walking through your home. Also, ask to see the results of the background and credit check. Ask to see responses to personal and prior rental references. Demand to be the final say on who you will rent to and how much you want for rent. We didn't get to do this with our first tenant. If we had, we might have made a different decision. We would never discriminate on a situation EVER, but we'd have taken a harder and longer look at the financial situation. Cosigner or not.

Take pictures of everything in your home the day you release the property to the renter. EVERYTHING. When that renter moves out, take photos of EVERYTHING the day they fully vacate. Don't do anything, don't clean, do nothing. If you can be there the day the tenant vacates and can do an exit walkthrough, please do this. Document everything. Sign everything. Keep all receipts. If you can't be there, ask a close friend. If you have a property manager, ask them.

If you opt to try to find tenants and create a lease from online documents, talk with a lawyer who does landlord/tenant law. Ask them to create the lease for you or review the lease you want to use. As a landlord, you want to be fully covered legally in the event your tenant fails to pay rent, acquires pets you don't approve of/agree to or abandons the property and leaves it a mess. If you have to go after your tenant for back rent, eviction, etc., lawyer up. Do everything by the book. In most cases, if you have to seek legal help, the costs go back to the tenant. Be prepared in the event that it does not. Your lawyer should be able to help you understand what would be involved in the way of time and money.

If you've never used one, find a good CPA to help do your taxes. Ours gave us a worksheet so come tax time, we could send him everything he needs to complete our taxes. We can call him at any point to ask tax questions and we love that. He's been our tax guy for 10 years. There were so many things we forgot to track and submit for taxes. I started an excel file to track rental revenue, rental loss and all the different areas from the worksheet given to us. I notate if I have a receipt for the expense.

On a separate tab, I've created a worksheet for the actual tenant. I keep track of rent and the date it hits my account, late fees, property management fees, and then I track important conversations with dates and overview of conversation, reason for any large repairs, verbal agreements made with the tenant and reasons for non-payment of rent (if applicable). I also track dates of lease and then put a meeting request in my outlook calendar for 60 days before lease expiration (this is usually the time you can start showing the property for new tenants if your current tenants don't want to renew or you don't want to renew with the tenant).

If you, my fellow reader, have any tips and tricks to being a landlord that you find extremely helpful, please leave me a comment. I'd love to hear about them and share with others. If you are a tenant and have comments on how to be a better landlord, I'd love to hear and share them too. We are tenants as well, however I feel like even tho we live in a rental, we are treating it as if we own it because we'd want our tenants to treat our home the same way. But that's a whole other post on living in military housing.