Top 2-3 lesson you learned the hard way?

[Pawel N.]

I'd love to hear about your memorable experiences that provided you with lasting lessons and lead to changes to the way you operate your business now. What were those changes to your overall management system moving forward?

[Michael Hayworth]

This is a business. Treat it like it.

Tenants lie. Tenants will involve you in their drama if you let them. Tenants will come up with sob stories if you buy 'em and let late rent slide. Be courteous, but professional. Focus on the business side of things.

Don't chase money. Get your tenants on autodraft payments. We use eRentPayment.com, but there are several good systems out there. Your time is too valuable to spend it chasing down tenants for payments.

Make it clear who (tenant) is responsible for plumbing blockages, which is the most common service call a landlord gets. Based on some advice I saw here on BP, we're changing our policy. We used to send our plumber out, but tell tenants "If it's a tenant caused blockage, you'll be responsible for it." But that left us chasing money, which I just said we don't like to do. Now we're going to have a page in the lease saying blockages are assumed to be tenant caused, but if they bring us evidence that it's a broken drain pipe or something like that, we'll reimburse them for their expenses.

Good luck.