Damage walk through pre move in

[Chris O.]

Tenant and I walked through. I’m a little over whelmed (as is he) what to fill out. The hardwood has light scratches in lots of places, and the walls have some holes from last tenant painting etc - but there was no major damage. Are we supposed to document every minor scratch on the floor and nail home in the wall? 

[Jim K.]

@Chris O.

Hi, Chris, what you chose to document is going to largely depend on your business model. I sign one-year leases with my tenants and a large number of them choose to stay three or more years. In those cases, I've typically gone through the property and repaired the nail holes as well as touched up the paint on the wall before the tenant walkthrough. I encourage the tenant to document everything s/he feels could possibly be noteworthy. But this is what I do in my rentals, as a self-managing DIY landlord working in borderline C/D-class properties. I am my own handyman, and I hardened my own rentals. So I tend to leave everything blank and sign off on anything the tenant feels I might be concerned about after they decide to move out.

A little bit of goodwill here goes a long way. If you are relying on a spreadsheet of carefully projected expenses to reach a breakeven point on this rental, and you're relying on contractors and expensive handyman services to do all your fixing, yeah, you're going to want to document as much as possible, and take lots of date-stamped pictures.