Landlord Tip of the Week

In response to last week's tip about the rental agreement, we got the following great suggestion from landlord Brad Grayson:

Great advice on leases clauses. I would add three points:

Lease should contain written, signed move-in condition of the home.
Update and edit your lease constantly. Steal every good idea from articles, landlords, other leases, court cases. Customize to match your judge’s thinking and local laws.
Time spent orienting/training the new tenant makes managing easier and more profitable. We do a “Lease Ceremony” – tell new tenant to allow an hour and get a sitter for the kids. We review the lease highlights, they initial each critical clause, answer their questions, do a safety walk (breakers, shut offs, filters), handle monies, give keys, and take their picture while happy in a clean home.

Now to this week's tip

Landlord Damita Russett-Allen wrote to suggest a tip. Her issue:

Lately when we have a vacancy, while we are preparing the property (apartment/house) for rental we have break-ins. Just last night we had someone break into one of our apartments that was ready to start showing and bust sheet rock and glass. It was just vandalism. They had already broken a couple of windows and saw we left nothing to steal.

Thanks for the suggestion, Damita.

I did some research on the question and found some interesting information, ideas and suggestions.

First, let’s look at why do people break in to vacant properties.

There are three reasons. One, as Ms. Allen found, was simple vandalism. That is usually kids (under 25 with mental ages of 13) looking for a “good time.” They just want to trash something. Lucky you, it’s your property.

Second, it could be drug users looking for a plaIn response to last week's tip about securing vacant properties, we got the following from Arkansas landlord Robert Young:

Not only is booby trapping your property a bad idea, it is illegal. There is an old U.S. Supreme Court case directly on this matter where a landowner set up a shotgun to go off to stop the repeated thefts. Sure enough the shotgun goes off and permanently injures the thief. Protection of property by deadly force was ruled to be not allowed. The prosecutor could pursue murder charges if you killed someone or battery charges if you hurt someone and you would face jail-time. Don't do it. If it is that big of a problem, forget the $450 a month iron doors and screens. Pay the utilities, put in a blow up mattress, and pay someone to sleep there so much each night. Then it is not vacant. If they are breaking in with someone there, then you have bigger problems finding any tenant to stay there. I often go by properties after work and turn on light and go by before work to turn them off.

Thanks, Rob.

__________________

Thought I would pass along this tip that I do to insure that the property is not being trashed. I have a schedule on all my properties, and on a monthly basis I give the Tenant an 8 hour notice (which is not the same day every time, and is included in our lease) that I need to enter the premises and inspect furnace filters, check the faucets, and etc. to insure that they are operating good. This not only gives me a chance to check on the above but also observe how they are taking care of my property. By doing this I have came across extra people occupying, pets and other infractions that I would not otherwise know about.

Gary Meritt

B & G Properties, LLC

This is the actual question I got in a call from a landlord. I have condensed the question, because the circumstances of the situation came out little by little during the conversation.

Question:

"I just got a call from the police department that they have evidence that my rental property has drug dealers living in it. They've been to the property twice in the past week and arrested people.

"The man who is living there is the son of the tenant I rented to. He was no prize, but he got transferred, and his son moved in after he left.

"Besides that, there's garbage all over, and the place is trashed.

"How do I get them out?"

Answer:

In most states getting a tenant out is relatively easy. It only requires a 30-day notice (some states have a 20, 15, 10-day or even 7-day notice, either for cause, or for no cause, as the landlord wishes. There are, of course, notable exceptions around the country where it is more difficult or nigh on to impossible to protect your property from a bad tenant already living there.

The real question is, how did the situation get this bad?

First, how did this tenant get in the property to begin with? This landlord apparently doesn't check anybody's references or demand any kind of evidence that this individual will be a good tenant? I constantly hear landlords whine about having bad tenants, when they are the ones who allowed these miscreants to move in.

Just because the tenant is the offspring of the old tenant doesn't automatically mean he will be your ideal renter. Every adult who will live in your property needs to pass muster.

Even the most cursory reference checking would probably have found out about this tenant. You know that this is not the first time he has been in trouble with the law. Getting court records is easy. Tenant screening companies offer this service along with their credit reports.

Second, doesn't this landlord ever check the property? She had to wait for the police to tell her that the place is trashed inside and out. To see damage to the outside, all you have to do is drive by. That in itself would have clued her in on how the tenants were treating her investment.

We are not helpless to deal with problems with renters. Numerous avenues are available for seeing to it that our tenants treat our properties appropriately. It is also easy to check tenants out before they get a chance to move into our rental property. Look in the Yellow Pages under "Credit Reports," or better yet, join your local landlord or apartment association, see the list of apartment and landlord associations on this site, they often have tenant screening services for members also look for tenant screening companies on this site . Also check out RealChek America and Zip Reports , two companies that makes tenant screening available from the Rental Property Reporter web site.

Better no tenant than a bad tenant.

Renting to tenants who deal drugs and trash property does not do us as property owners, our other tenants (the good ones), or our community any good.

Landlord Question

Your tenant is late paying the rent so you decide to turn off the electricity and water until your tenant pays the rent. Are you legally allowed to turn off utilities to punish late rent payments?

Absolutely not! As I wrote in the landlord manual, Evictions: How to Win (or Lose) Them:

You remember the old adage, “What you don't know won't hurt you.” Somewhere, sometime
it may be true, but exactly the opposite is true in the rental property business. What you don't
know usually comes up to bite you on the gluteus maximus. This landlord was dangerously
close to acting out of ignorance before she wrote to me. Too often landlords do act out of
ignorance of the law and find themselves in a world of hurt.

Witness the case of the brothers Kopchinski, who thought owning and managing rental
property would be just about the coolest thing they could do. But they ran afoul of the law by removing a tenant's possessions from the apartment and leaving them on the street, because the tenant hadn't paid rent for an eternity. Actually it was just a month and a half, it just seemed like an eternity to the Kopchinskis. They didn't bother with an eviction, courts, judges, writs and inconveniences such as those, they just broke into the apartment (the tenant had changed the locks) and put her stuff on the street.

That is a violation of the landlord-tenant law in probably every state in the union. So the
brothers got to bother with courts and a judge anyway. “But we are young and inexperienced, and were operating in good faith,” they pleaded. The judge told them to pay the tenant $7,139.00 for the damage to the tenant's property.

Too many landlords think they can get rid of a bad tenant by turning off the electricity or
heat, changing the locks on the door, or simply taking off the front door. That is considered “constructive eviction.” It is also called “self-help” eviction and the courts do not look kindly on it. While it may make you feel great at the moment to “get” the rotten tenant who doesn't feel as if paying rent on time or at all is of any importance, the feeling will be short lived.

How Bad Tenants Get to Rent from Landlords

How Bad Tenants Get to Rent from Landlords