Controlling Trash on Property

[Mike O'Connor]

Hi All - We have a property in Cobb Co., GA and while everything is going great, we are dealing with one annoying issue that we cannot get our arms around - tenants leaving trash around the complex. The property is only 32 units, so it is not big enough for us to have a full time employee on site to help manage this, but we do have someone on site 2 days a week and then pay someone to do a sweep of the grounds 4 days a week.

It seems that even if we pick up at 9am, there is trash by 3pm. The neighbor across the street has made it her personal mission to call code enforcement every day, even for the smallest of trash violations (most days the violations are very minor from what the contact at code enforcement told us). However, we have just received our first citation from Cobb Co. even though most violations are small. Code stated that they legally have to serve us the fine.

Does anyone have experience with managing trash on a property and /or dealing with the neighbor / county? We have added extra trash bins, hired help to pick up the trash and our next step is to install cameras on the property so that we can start levying fines by catching people in the act.

Any creative ideas would be much appreciated.

Mike

@Matt Wood@Azeez K.@Kiran K

[Kyle J.]

Two ideas come to mind.  

Idea #1 -  Make contact with the neighbor across the street who is calling in the complaints and let her know that you're on the same team because you also don't like to see trash on your property.  Try to befriend her and ask her to call you directly next time she sees the trash, instead of calling code enforcement.  That way, you (or the person you pay to do it) can respond directly to the issue and not involve code enforcement (and avoid the fine).

Idea #2 - Send a letter to all the tenants advising them of the problem and try to elicit their help in solving it.  They may not even realize it's a problem because the trash keeps getting picked up (maybe not til after code enforcement gets there and you get a fine - but they likely don't know that part of it).  Tell them that if the problem doesn't stop, that you may have to raise their rents to help pay for all the fines from code enforcement.  That should give them some financial motivation to help solve the problem.