Tenant Turnover at 1600 S 27th

BACKGROUND:

This 4 bedroom 3 bath, 2 car garage, 2076 SF mid entry home was built in 1993.

My parents bought this home brand new as a rental. They own the rental home next door, a couple down the street, and up to 50 units within two miles of this home. Mount Vernon is a rural town 60 miles north of Seattle, right on the I-5 corridor. While the industry here is mainly agriculture and industrial, many people commute 30 miles south to Boeing.

I personally own one single family home that I bought a year ago. I spruced it up and got it ready for a tenant, and helped place the new tenant. My dad does most of the management since it is just a few doors down from all of his other properties. Other than that, I just help my dad and am available when we needs me. He’s been doing this landlord thing for 35 years, so I have inherently learned some minor real estate skills. I’ve realized that it’s almost second nature for me since my parents have lived and breathed real estate for my entire life. But when it comes down to the actual execution, I have a lot to refine as I do it for myself. Total turnover time was 15 days, and here is my journal of my first tenant turnover.

PREVIOUS TENANTS:

This house has always been a good rental. It’s larger than most other homes on the long, dead end cul-de-sac; others are one level, 3/2, around 1300 SF. The last tenant was in there since August 2014 and paid $1495 a month. The tenant is responsible for all utilities (water, sewer, garage, natural gas, and electric) and lawn maintenance.

When the house came up vacant, my dad wanted to sell, but since he owns the home free and clear, I convinced him to keep it as a rental and continue with the good cash flow. Since he was tired of managing it and didn’t want to deal with the turn over, he sought out a local property management company who requested that he do some deck maintenance first, and suggested the rent be $1600 a month. My dad wanted $1700 a month, and didn’t follow up with them. I was still set on him keeping the house, so naturally it was my turn to play property manager and get the house rented. So enter in me and my husband to do the work to turnover the house and acquire a new tenant.

TIMELINE:

Sunday August 28: The tenants are gone, have moved out of town, and said we could enter their property. I post an ad on Craigslist and Zillow. The ad is just one picture of the exterior with its lackluster curb appeal, and too many words from my dad’s details rental description (making him sound like an overbearing, nitpicking, fee charging landlord).

Wednesday August 31: Throughout the week, I set up a series of appointments with six potential tenants for showing in the evening, spaced out about a half hour apart. Some people cancel earlier, some at the last minute, but no one shows up. Nobody. Because the house is still under the tenant contract until midnight, we do not do anything to clean up. There is furniture everywhere, food in the refrigerator, and it’s a dirty mess everywhere. I guess it was a good thing nobody showed up.

Thursday Sept. 1: I write a forum post about the lack of people showing up, just hoping to write it down so one day I can look back at my humble beginnings. I get a ton of great feedback from the Bigger Pockets community regarding the showing process, and the critique of my dismal Craiglist ad. It was an awesome conversation to hear what other people thought of my experience and how I could do better.

What I learned from that ad post:

1. 1. Have the home clean and show ready before showing to potential tenants
2. 2. For the ad, have fewer words and more pictures. Pictures should be bright and professional. Curb appeal will help too, the house looked so bland.
3. 3. For showings, do an open house or schedule everyone for the same time, as to waste as little of your time.
4. 4. Maybe it was priced to high and someone did some online comps and suggested lowering the price to $1495 to get more interest. We ended up getting our original asking of $1700 a month.

Friday Sept. 2: The house gets cleaned of the remaining furniture and the carpets get professionally cleaned.

Saturday Sept. 3: We get started on the front landscape and curb appeal. We purchase about $250 worth of flowers, bushes, mulch, and topsoil from Lowes. We spent about 4 hours at the house working on the front yard. While working on the house, we put out a “For Rent” sign and got lots of people stopping by from the Zillow ap, the open house hours (posted noon - 1pm) or just neighbors stopping by for a daughter, friend, etc.

Sunday Sept. 4: Now to the worn front porch, I give it a fresh coat of thick white paint, and also give the front double doors four coats of white. We spent about 6 hours working on the house. The house cleaner came over and started working on the interior. About 4 people stop by today.

Monday Sept. 5 (Labor Day): We continued to do more painting on the front and spent about 6 hours working. Now, I was able to get good photos of the front and all the rooms of the house. Thought just with my camera phone, I lightened up the photos and they were good enough to post. The ad was paired down to just the important words (thanks to the BP community), and the pictures showed the house in a good light.

Today, one lady stopped by to see the house via the open house posting. She filled out an application while onsite and paid $40 for the screening fee. She was the first person to actually fill out an application.

Tuesday Sept. 6: My husband continued to the back side of the house and tore off the top, rotting rails of the deck and switched them out with treated cedar. We purchased about $100 worth of wood from Lowes for this project, along with $40 of white stain. He also took down this huge tree / weed, but not much landscaping to the back yard needed. He worked on this project for some 8 hours over the course of the week. The applicant’s credit report came back good, and her references checked out positive.

Wednesday Sept. 7: I finally got a hold of the applicant and scheduled move-in day for Saturday. We didn’t do any signings or payments until Saturday. No need for a deposit to the hold the spot or anything.

Friday Sept. 9: Evening was last minute deep cleaning of the kitchen, finishing the back deck, and all the little things to get the house ready. My dad finished the rental agreement paperwork, and worked more on the inspection. His inspection is 13 pages long! 3 hours of total work tonight. The online ads are still active, and I was getting about 2-4 inquires per day during the week.

Saturday Sept. 10: We went to the house early to dust everything off and she came over at 9:30 to sign the paperwork. We prorated her rent starting on Thursday the 16th, and took her total deposit. We had the new keys ready and handed them over to her, but we will still be in the house until the 15th. We need to finish the final clean, make window screens and install them, put a couple more screws in the deck, new doors stops in some rooms, a new hook for a chandelier, a couple of other minor things, and finish the long inspection. At least we have a couple more days.

Wednesday Sept. 15: I made window screens and they were too big. So I cut them down, now they are too small! Ahh, time to measure, measure, measure and cut once.

Thursday Sept. 16: New tenant moves in.

THE PROCESS:

The only things that we hired out was the house cleaning to a lady that my dad just calls up when he needs something cleaned - very informal, and the professional carpet cleaning. We spend a total of 50 hours working on the house (for both my husband and me) and spent our entire Labor Day weekend laboring, along with some trips to Lowes. We could have hired some other parts out, but my husband and I actually enjoy doing some of the work like landscape and painting and the deck repair (but please, don’t give me the house cleaning part!). We are lucky with that fact that my dad has every tool we could ever need, and pretty much every spare little part that the house needed (like stockpiles of new range drip pans, door stops, washing machine hoses, window screen parts, deck screws, etc). So it’s hard to quantify the total cost of replaced items in the home used during the turnover, since he has so many things on hand (and that he buys in bulk from HD Supply). It was mostly just our labor and some plants and lumber from the store.

15 DAY TURNOVER:

I think that’s a pretty good turnover for a 2000 sf house. It wasn’t that trashed, just the generic cleaning and maintenance - no overhaul or anything completely new, no interior painting. I also think we could have gone faster if:

1. 1. We had good pictures for the rental description prior to advertise the house early
2. 2. The cleaning lady wasn’t just someone who stopped by after work when she had time
3. 3. My dad didn’t have lots of other things to do (I can’t blame him for being slow since he didn’t want to deal with the turnover in the first place)
4. 4. My husband and I subbed out some of the other work, or if it didn’t require us to revamp the front yard (our idea thanks to the suggestions for a better curb appeal from BP), maybe we did more than we needed to. And we also work full time jobs during the week.