When to do rental inspections for your property

When to do rental inspections on your property

Hi, this is Steve Rozenberg. I’m the owner and co-founder of Empire Industries Property Management and Realty Services. What we’re gonna talk about today is rental inspections. 

A lot of people always wanna know when they should do a rental inspection and how often and what it is they should look for. The first thing I would say is have it written in your lease that, number one, you can do them at any time or at random that you see fit to have to do one. That’s the first thing that I would recommend. Second of all, the way that we do our inspections is we try to do them systematically. When you have multiple properties, you wanna make sure it’s scalable and systemizable. So for us, we always do an inspection on month 9 and now we just started doing inspections on month 3. So the reason we do them on month 3 is because we figured they have now moved in, they’ve kind of settled in, so now we can do an inspection, see if there’s any challenges in the property, and also see how they’re living and how they are treating the property from the beginning to see if this is someone that we need to discuss some possible lease violations or some potential problems on the horizon.

We then do it at month 9, and the reason we do it on month 9 is that is our determining factor whether or not we are going to renew the lease with that tenant. So at month 9, we look and we see that they’re not treating the property correctly, and maybe there are some lease violations or some challenges or some problems, that’s when we would decide with the owner whether we are not recommending to renew the lease. Because even though it is a business for the owner, we wanna make sure that we are putting the right person in, and they’re taking care of the property and that the tenant knows they have a responsibility to take care of the property, and we’re going to make them accountable. So if you have just a few properties, what I would suggest is put it on a calendar, maybe a Google Calendar or some kind of alert that you do it shortly after they move in, and then before deciding whether or not you are gonna renew. Like I said, at month 9, we do that. We determine if they’re taking care of the property. If they’re taking care of the property, then we will go ahead and recommend sending a renewal lease to the tenant, renew the property, and obviously if they have any issues or anything that they want fixed, that’s when we would take care of it.

So this is Steve Rozenberg with Empire Industries. If you’d like more, you can look me up online at www.empireindustriesllc.com or you can give us a call directly if you’d like to know more about buying some properties or selling some properties or just want some help with your current portfolio, give me a call and I’d be glad to help you.