All Forum Posts by: Ben Freiermuth

@Will Gaston, thanks for your input. This unit has been a nightmare so far, because it is such a beautiful unit with it being high generating and close to campus. 

It is a five bedroom unit, eventually (long story short), two of them wanted to break the lease. We are still dealing with that process, with only collecting three tenant's rent. These same three tenants are the ones who had the party. 

Definitely a nightmare for my father and myself since I am entering the field this year. My father is a very generous person, but I am beginning to feel that we will have to go the legal route with this.

What is all of the evidence that I would have to gather in order to build a bullet-proof case? Any ideas? I guess the answers could help us both at this point. 

Emily -- I am just entering the property management side of my father's business, which has been in the college rental market for 25+ years. He has yet to have a vacancy to this date. There are defiantly pros and cons to this field from what I have learned from him so far. I believe negligence of some of our bad tenants have overrun the benefits in very rare cases. But most of the time, if you treat the student right, keep in contact with them, and supply a higher quality product with a higher quality price, this rids away of a *majority* of the bad tenants. You will always have a few bad apples. How we structure the subletting process in our business, is that we charge a $200 "we don't want to do this" fee to the tenant for breaking their lease and adding someone else. This isn't a charge that we want to charge them, it's insurance to make them second-guess themselves. Before, we didn't charge them anything which lead to a massive headache. 

If you would like to take a look at our website, and some of our policies we have for our tenants, feel free to navigate to www.hsirentals.com. 

We recently had the same thing happen to our college rentals. In one of our brand new buildings we had a unit have a "30-40" person party in the upper unit of our building. Long story short, the beam sagged an 1 3/4" and the metal ties started to pull apart. Our joists were engineered in Iowa, so we had our contractor send in pictures to the manufacturer to see how it would get fixed. They said to sister 11 7/8" LVL to each joist to strengthen the entire floor system. We already filed for a permit through the city in case if we had to dig deeper. This is all I know at the moment. 

My real question is, who is liable? The manufacturer, or the tenants?