Being a Landlord

Since the housing market wouldn't support what we needed to be able to sell our home, we had no other option but to rent the house. I had a really hard time coming to terms with that. We bought the house in 1999. Soldier and I had dated less than a year and I'd never bought a house. So much blood, sweat and tears went into this house. We got married, had two babies, created 10 years of our life in this house. We macked out the kitchen three years prior and I was so much in love with it. And we were in a great place financially.

We got what I thought was a great realtor to get the house rented for us. We just had to keep the house clean at that point. There was very little we had to do to get the house renter ready.

We talked many times with the realtor about property management or do we manage it ourselves from out of state. We figured it would be easy enough to manager ourselves. We knew a lot of tradespeople if work needed to be done and Soldier's parents live 10 minutes away if there was an emergency.

We got a tenant rather quickly and we adored them. Everything went well for some time. We knew the entire situation and I felt for them. I probably got to emotionally vested in them. I'm a generous person by nature and always want to give the benefit of the doubt. I think this was my downfall. I was to trusting and lenient. Our realtor wanted us to evict, but we knew we didn't have a legal leg to stand on. There was discussion about breaking the lease and because we knew the situation, we were willing to do whatever would make their situation easier.

Fast forward three months and we sent a letter asking for the final months rent and part of the expenses that were put out getting the house back in order. Maybe I worded it wrong, maybe my execution wasn't right, I don't know. We have a property manager for the tenants now and I ran this entire thing by her. She's been doing property management for years and I thought I was doing the right thing. She and my other voice of reason read through the letter and supporting documents and said everything looked OK and nothing was incorrectly stated based on the supporting documents I had.

What I received back in communication was heart stopping. I was being accused of things that never crossed my mind and things were said that I knew to not be true. I was angry, hurt, scared and mortified. I called Soldier and he went nuts. I called my voice of reason and she shared stuff with me to really make me thing about next steps. I called our property manager and she was totally miffed.

After much thought, discussion and trying to sleep on it, I decided to call a lawyer. We had a fantastic discussion and he assured me of some fears that I had. I feel much better about how we decided to proceed. I would advise new landlords to keep everything from receipts to texts to emails or other types of communication. Have everything in writing and signed by both sides if changes or arrangements outside of the lease have been made.

I will forever advise landlords to hire a property management company. We love ours and our property manager is amazing. She's a great buffer and gives us plenty to think about when making decisions about repairs and gives us her honest opinion about situations that come up. It's worth the monthly fee to have her. She's local, knows the neighborhood and has plenty of knowledge and experience.

Financially, I would advise new landlords to be wise in their spending. Just because the mortgage is or almost is being covered by rent, don't assume it's going to be that way. Always budget the mortgage in full just in case. I didn't and am scraping the barrel until October. My credit score fell over a hundred points and I'm late on everything. Soldier pays all the house bills and childcare since I pay for all things house. I hadn't been late making a mortgage payment in years. Now, I'm on a repayment plan because I was always a month behind since losing rent from when our first tenant vacated and had to put quite a bit of money into the house to get it ready to rent. The new tenants have been nickel and diming stuff and there's that cost. Those have pretty much stopped. I'm not spending money where it's not needed and staggering bills and makely barely the minimum payments just to stop the calls. If I could go back to this time last year and have a re-do with the knowledge I have now, I would. Hands down. I'd take the good, bad and ugly that came with regular life, but would do things different in regards to being a landlord. And unfortunately, our role as a landlord are not going to change anytime soon.