Yes, I Just gave away 500 Ibs. Of Hams to my tenants …. Why

[Art Mimnaugh]

So as landlord’s we know we are vilified in most of the media with rent strikes and evictions moratorium’s covering the headlines! The reality is our costs keep coming and there is no one covering the debit and expenses we have due.

A bit of background I am based in San Francisco and have been investing in multifamily C class assets in Columbus, OH for the last three years. We focus primarily on buy and hold but do have several flips as well as private lending contracts. We have grown our portfolio to 30 units we own entirely and an additional 14 units we have with additional partners.

About a year ago we began to grow concerned that the rent appreciation that we were seeing was growing much faster than the income growth for most of our tenets in this asset class. As an example in 12 months we saw rents grow from $550 to $750. To help mitigate the risk we made the decision to start supporting Section 8 based tenants and currently have about 40% of our portfolio through these programs. There are many considerations with this but in general has been a very positive experience with those rent's posting on the 3rd every month.

This brings me to the current situation. Class C tenants tend to be very working class, living pay check to pay check and have been disproportionately affected by the current job losses. At the beginning of the month I did send out the letters to let everyone know rent is still due, and links to the various resources they could be eligible for in the event of a job loss. But let’s be honest that comes across as very self-serving, and not very genuine. In these times people are really looking for a little empathy and compassion. So, what I did was to have a ham delivered to each of our tenets with a little note to let them know we care and hope they can have an enjoyable meal. In the note, we also let the tenets know that if they were having some hard times to please reach out and let us know so we can work out a solution.

Will this have an impact on rent payments, who knows! For April across our portfolio as of this weekend we are seeing about 80% of our tenants paid. I can say that we have had VERY positive feedback from tenants calling to just tell us how much it meant and how appreciative they were for the small gesture. What I do know is don’t underestimate the value of caring and don’t view it as a weakness. We all run businesses but those businesses are only as good as our customers. Be human, and know that when everything passes people have a soul and will remember those that were there for them.

Cheers,

ART