Tenant proofing your property

[Chris Morrison]

What are some techniques to help tenant proof your rental property. We have pergo flooring throughout and have been lucky and used our home warranty to replace some big ticket items while we've been living in it. 

Looking for some thoughts and tips. 

Thanks in advance.

[Jim K.]

It really depends on the housing class and what kind of investor you are.

I'm a C-class handyman investor. The bulk of my portfolio is in single-family housing. Some of my properties are as much as 90 years old. In that world, laminate (Pergo) flooring and home warranties aren't ways to tenant-proof a property, they're liabilities.

Home warranties are a great tool to sell a flipped house to a residential buyer who is worried about buying an old house that might have sudden problems. But relying on them to handle your repairs in the kind of housing I'm describing usually means that the tenants are subjected to long wait times, multiple callbacks, every attempt to get things done on the cheap instead of initial purposeful action. It's much better to have a trusted handyman or two you normally work with and a small group of skilled tradesmen to rely on when things really get nasty. It is not easy to build up this network and it is not cheap. But you need to do it if you expect to get reliable, consistent results, and it isn't going to happen except by great good luck for just one property in an area.

Pergo is the most recognizable brand name for floating laminate flooring, which is plasticized medium-density fiberboard overlaid with a photograph of wood-grain flooring. It wears like iron, BUT, if water gets into into it or in high-humidity conditions, Pergo swells and cracks. If it is incorrected installed, Pergo can hump and creates a void beneath. The planks can separate easily. Pergo is more or less a scam in the kind of housing I deal with. It's much better to rely on 3/4" oak tongue-and-groove flooring sealed in place with two heavy coats of oil-based polyurethane over it, or well-laid ceramic tile. Those kinds of flooring will last decades with minimal maintenance, but the kicker is that the maintenance guy has to have some basic woodworking and tiling skills to fix and refinish it. Since I do, and I understand that I'll need to find or train a replacement if I ever decide to remove myself from the business, I'm fine. But if I didn't, I would largely choose to rely on more durable LVP, luxury vinyl plank, waterproof and probably glued in place. Even stapled-down luan plywood with a glued-down sheet vinyl overlay is a better choice than fragile Pergo.

One of our better tenant-proofing tricks is very simple and will work almost anywhere, put in a large piece of glued-down 40-mil PVC shower pan liner under every sink in a cabinet. It's amazing how much money these gray sheets will save you over the years.