Rental Property Yard is Flooding

[Gary Lawson]

Good Morning!

I have a single family home that I purchased in Southeast Michigan in January 2018.  I have a tenant in there now, and am working with a property manager due to the fact that I do not live in Michigan.  Twice now the tenant has called the property manager to communicate that the back yard is flooding when it rains, providing pictures that substantiate the claim.  The flooding is not impacting the house, just making the backyard pretty wet for a day or two until the precipitation infiltrates the soil (I have included a picture below).  I should point out that Michigan has had an excessively wet year with a lot of snow over the winter, frozen ground late into the spring, and a healthy amount of rain the last few months.

My property manager is telling me the flooding is a significant problem, and that I should take action.  His recommendation is that I should go back to the seller, who did not disclaim any flooding or grading issues in the Seller's Disclosure, and hold their feet to the fire.  His point is that taking care of grading issues is not going to be cheap, and this has to be a historic issue.

Trying to weigh in on other experience and get a second opinion, I also talked to my real estate agent (who is also an investor in Southeast Michigan and has been a pretty honest resource as a new investor).  His thoughts were doubtful that this is a disclosure issue, and should be contributed to a late, wet winter, which led to saturated ground in the wet spring.

I am hoping you all may have some insight from your experiences on how to handle the situation to keep the tenant happy and my property safe while limiting my costs as much as possible. 

[Frank Adams]

I don't really know much about the subject (just want to get that out there) but I had a friend who had a similar thing happen to him. A couple of people suggested regrading the whole yard, very expensive and would have ruined his cash flow so he kept asking around. He asked a mutual friend who came over and looked at it and proposed a cheap, and easy solution. His problem, like your only occurred a few times a year.

What he did was dig out an area in the middle of the 4 or five worst area. He kind of tapered the ground leading into each one. Then he dug trenches out to the front yard/sidewalk area. I think he rented a "Ditch Witch" machine for all of this. He just created 4 "French drains" and it solved his problem for less than a few hundred bucks.

You might go to the forums on doityourself dot com and post it and do some research on French drains.