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Updated over 10 years ago on . Most recent reply

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Chris Simmons
  • Real Estate Agent
  • Owasso, OK
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Do you let tenants know you own the property?

Chris Simmons
  • Real Estate Agent
  • Owasso, OK
Posted

For those of you that self manage, do you let the tenants and applicants know that you are the property owner, or do you have more success passing yourself off as the property manager that represents investors....in this case yourself?

Thoughts?

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Marcia Maynard
  • Investor
  • Vancouver, WA
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Marcia Maynard
  • Investor
  • Vancouver, WA
Replied

We own and manage our own properties. We let the tenants know. It has never been a problem. An enterprising soul could find out easily enough anyway.  Open and honest communication is important to us. We would not intentionally mislead a tenant to believe something that was not true. We expect tenants to be open and honest with us as well. It is something we value.

We operate under two LLCs. Since we don't maintain a business office outside of our home. Our home address is the official address for business and tax purposes. The LLC is the contracting party in the rental agreements and the LLC can be easily found on the Washington State government licensing websites, which will reveal our names as the owners and our address. No use in hiding it.

We use a P.O. Box for interfacing with the public. We direct the tenants to use our P.O. Box for correspondence and to send rent payments to it as well. Washington State law requires us to give tenants an address where we could be personally served legal documents, in the event they want to file suit against us for any reason. So at the end of our rental agreements, in the legal remedies section, our home address appears for this purpose.

We have been renting residential properties for almost 20 years. I notice there are many quality tenants who are tired of doing business with large corporate owners and their management teams.  Also many are wary of doing business with owners who turn the customer interface over to a property management company. So we fill a niche, in that we own and manage our own properties. We even state this in our marketing materials and in our BP profile. We like to provide personalized service in this manner and tenants like to know this.

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