Trouble Tenants...I'm Overwhelmed

[Account Closed]

I own a SFH in California which I rented out October 2018. Since day 1, the tenants have been contacting me on a daily/weekly basis requesting repairs.

Some of these repairs are warranted (replaced the water heater, fixed broken windows, fixed faulty sprinkler valves) while others I feel are not (most recently the light bulb in the garage isn't working). 

I've spent well over $5,000 in repairs since they've moved in (it's only been 9 months)  and honestly I'm sick of this. What's worse is that they find fault in many of the repairmen I send over. These are licensed individuals whom I have been working with for over a decade who are loved by all other tenants except these.

Most recently, there's apparently a slew of electrical issues in the house, including a few outlets that don't work, the A/C not cooling, along with the faulty lightbulb in the garage. I sent my electrician to take a look and over the course of a week, between he and his team, they fixed the issues...or so I thought. This morning the tenant contacted me and told me they're still having issues and that the electrician didn't fix everything and that he didn't show up when he said he would. I told them it's their responsibility to make sure all the issues are addressed with the electrician before he leaves to prevent consistent visits over the same problems and to follow up with him if he didn't make the visit.

They proceeded to get mad at me and my electrician, saying that it's not professional for the repairmen to forget what he needs to fix, that I'm blaming them, etc. I've been trying my best all these months to give them the benefit of the doubt and I've worked diligently to fix everything they've brought up within a few weeks time max, but I'm sick of making repairs, I'm sick of being contacted nonstop, and I'm sick of these people hating on my repairmen.

Not sure what my question is here, perhaps I just need to rant to fellow landlords, but any advice you can give with regards to dealing with such tenants would be appreciated.

[Jim K.]

@Account Closed

There's obviously more to this story, and I'm not seeing the ability to look at things from the tenant's side that every successful landlord needs to cultivate. So let me be the tenant's devilish advocate here and don't take anything I say here personally.

Let's look at what you've stated you needed to do in this house in the nine months that you've been renting it out:

1. Replace the water heater.

2. Fix broken windows.

3. Fix faulty sprinkler valves

4. Fix outlets that don't work

5. Fix (central?) A/C

6. Fix one or more lighting sockets that don't work.

7. Remove tree with roots that infiltrated the sewer line, deal with pile of woodchips left by tree removal.

OK, by any reasonable definition, I think you have to admit the house has been a piece-of-s*** for these tenants and was beat to hell when you rented it to them. Because that's a lot of problems cropping up in a very short amount of time.

Did you just buy this place prior to October 2018 and not do a thorough snagging of it? It sure sounds like it. You can't buy a POS cheap, inadequately snag it, dump tenants into it, and not be prepared for the POS to manifest its POS-ness. 

(Well, you can, but you'll lose money every time doing it.)

1. Did you scope the sewer line before you bought the place?

2. Did you check the electrical board?

3. Did you stick a wiring tester in each of the outlets?

4. Did you make sure the lighting sockets weren't faulty?

5. Did you check the age of the water heater?

6. Did you inspect the sprinkler valves?

7. Did you look at the busted windows?

8. Did you run the A/C?

Now, let's talk about your electrician. I'm afraid he's not passing the sniff test.

Your electrician couldn't fix circuit wiring that didn't work, couldn't check and replace outlets, couldn't check and replace lighting sockets/fixtures, and isn't answering the phone when they call him about the fact that they live in a giant fire hazard. If you think that's harsh, well, I'm not an electrician and I can do all that -- it's not rocket science. But you're telling them it's their responsibility to make sure your house is good and fixed for you, and not to whine to you about it. And of course you've mentioned here that everyone else who rents from you thinks that this electrician-of-obviously-questionable-competence is God's gift to alternating current.

A does not equal B does not equal C here.

The windows...you can't rent a house with busted windows. Did the tenants bust them? Or are you complaining that they should have lived happily paying rent for busted windows?

The wood chips -- It was YOUR tree, YOUR contractor didn't clean up after himself. Send a guy down there with a rake or go down there yourself -- - your tenants don't pay you rent to rake out a large chipped tree's worth of wood chips your contractor left behind. Trust me, they don't think of themselves as your free landscaping crew.

In their minds, they feel you should have known the roots were infiltrating the sewer line before they rented it out to you, and now you're hoping they clean up the rest of the mess that they should have never had to deal with, and you should never have put on them.

Just step back and look, once again. They're pissed off because you rented them a POS with a  bad water heater at the end of its service life, bad windows, electrical problems, sewer-line problems, busted sprinklers. You're sick of the situation? You think they're not sick of worrying what the next problem the POS you rented to them is going to throw at them?

I'm not one of those BPers who insist brightly that running rentals is a 100% people job. It isn't. But when you deal with unhappy tenants, you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes. You need to be as harsh on yourself as they are likely to be. Otherwise, you'll never understand their point of view.

I'm sure the analysis I've presented above is unfair to you at certain points, maybe at all points. But what I wanted with you was give you a picture of what it might look like from your tenants' point of view. The goal was not to be accurate, but to run some of your statements through a tenant filter.