All Forum Posts by: Dan Pritchard

@Jennifer T. Thanks for reply. I think that is fair and pretty much what our LL has done. I posted here knowing it’s a landlord dominated site to get LL perspective. Makes sense to me. I’d be doing the same in your shoes.

@Nathan G. Apologies Nathan didn’t mean to come off that way but my post was a little poorly written. Was more just playing devils advocate to the tenant side with my recent comment. I can see where you got that from my post though. As stated I’m good with the sale. My wife and I discussed last night that even if we were not we’d still end up cleaning etc. Just how we are. Not looking for $40 an hour to mow the lawn or be fawned over. Appreciate the response.

@Nathan G. I’m glad they made the offer and it seems like the right thing to do. In fairness it also benefits the owner to keep a good relation with tenant while selling. In our case we are keeping lawn mowed, sweeping deck, wiping counters and bathrooms and vacuuming every day. if I had a tenant doing that for $200 I’d consider it well worth it. I do agree with you overall but pointing out that keeping a good relationship with a tenant is beneficial to the LL as well. Showing a clean somewhat staged house can surely net most sellers a lot more than $200. I’ve paid cleaning services more than that for bi monthly cleanings. Our landlord also communicated with us and the realtor in trying to minimize impact and give everyone warning. End of the day I’m glad we have a good relationship but I’m not going to 100% agree that a tenant should sit back and be greatful for the chance to clean a house and leave x amount of times while strangers wander around their home for $200. I guess that just comes down to what value you put on your time. I value my time at a lot more now than I did when I was renting in my 20s.

@John Teachout no I haven’t. Even if it didn’t I’d still do the showings. Something to keep in mind if I ever become a residential LL. I’ll probably dig it out just to see. I imagine it varies some from state to state as well. I can see from owners perspective you want to be able to show it. I’m sure there are some tenants that feel the opposite.

@Colleen F. Thanks for reply. I have no intention of making it a big deal. Like I said mostly out of curiousity. Owners have always been reasonable with me and I’ll certainly do the same. I was just a little surprised that a few people I talked with were saying things along the lines they wouldn’t be happy about it etc. We keep a clean house usually and have been picking up just like we did when selling our own homes. I want them to have a successful sale. This isn’t a situation where we are being booted or not wanting to leave.

@Theresa Harris also agree about timing. I realized I’d want to put it on early summer too.

@Theresa Harris I’m not against it I just know from selling several houses what a pain it is. Seems like unless the lease states I have to accommodate showings that I am paying for the home for my use. We have a good relationship with the owners so I don’t mind it. But if I had to be out for showings while otherwise I can be working from my home office earning my hourly consulting rate I would maybe start to feel like I’m losing $$ to sell someone else’s property. I’ve just had a few people express surprise that we were allowing showings so was wondering if it was not the norm. Once I thought about I started to see where they had a point. I haven’t been a renter for 15+ years so this is new to me.

This is mostly out of curiosity. Currently we are in a rental buying a house next month. We sold our house and moved last year into current rental. Current house the owners put on the market and offered $200 off of $2800 rent for our inconvenience. I said we’d do our best but with 3 kids and packing for our own move would be fairly limited in how often we’d be able to show it. It hasn’t turned into an inconvenience due to them listing quite a bit over what the market suggests it’s worth. Only two showings in five days. And this is a smoking hot market. We’ve been trying to buy for a year and have plenty of assets income etc so I know this area pretty well. Thinking about when we sold our own house it was way more than a $200 inconvinence to me based on how I value my time if we’d had ten showings the first weekend. What do you all typically do when trying to sell a property with renters currently in it? It should be noted they also could have just waited a month for us to be out and then they could have put some work into the place and maybe gotten a price closer to what they’re hoping.