All Forum Posts by: Danelle Harrison

@Nicholas Jackson

If a tenant tells me they are going to be late I always ask them "how late?" Normally I will wait until that period is up. If they haven't paid me by then, that's when I issue a three day notice. If they say they are going to be two weeks late then I would demand a partial payment up front. I don't want to let them get a month behind because it takes three weeks to get a court case once you file and their deposit only covers a month's rent at most. Tenants who get a month behind in my experience, will never catch up. This was all pre-pandemic. Post-pandemic I have given people more slack if I knew their situation was Covid-related, partially because I knew federal aid was coming and I could afford to be patient. No, I would never consider raising rent by $200 but I've seen apartment complexes do this mostly in the beginning of the third year of occupancy.  Mississippi laws are all landlord friendly and do next to nothing to protect tenants.  In fact I bought my first property in Mississippi when they did that in the apartment complex where I was living in in Ridgeland. I did the math and figured it would be cheaper to buy. Mind you, I stayed about a month and a half after my lease expired because the close kept getting delayed and I paid them the old amount. They took the money and didn't object but I didn't get my deposit back so it came out about even. (I had to leave one room dirty because I had a plane to catch.) To be honest before this year the only time I raised rent on a tenant was when they made me mad by not taking their trampoline down when I said they couldn't have it (insurance reasons.) Because of what happened with property values and rents recently I am raising rents when leases expire now but only by about $25 a month which means they are still well below current market rates, so no one is going to move. A landlord's biggest expense is turnover so normally we want to keep tenants as long as possible. If you have a lease I'm not sure how they could increase what you owe by any amount whatsoever until the lease expires. Or are you saying they are increasing it by that much when the lease ends? In California you have to give 60 days notice to raise the rent but in Mississippi they only need 30 days. Mind you, I only own houses. When it is a multi-unit property or there is a property manager involved things are going to be much stricter and less personal. A property manager isn't going to want to mess with partial payments like I did when I lived in walking distance from most of my tenants. Since I'm now living in California whenever one of my houses goes vacant or I need to do an eviction, the property gets turned over to my property manager. I've actually only got one property left that I'm managing myself and that's the one where I get my rent three months in advance from federal funds.