All Forum Posts by: Michele Fischer

Welcome to BiggerPockets, Trent! We just jumped in, and have been successful, if not in exactly the niche we'd want to be in if we were wiser in the beginning. A lot of the experience is in trial and error rather than research, so it's kind of a catch 22. Good luck!

My market is low income, in a smaller suburb about an hour away from a larger higher priced city. So Craigslist gets us a lot of folks from the bigger city, where signs get us people familiar with the low income neighborhood. Applicants lose points on my point scale for not living in my city for the past 5 years - my logic is that they don't understand the area so may bail faster and will be harder to find when they move out compared to folks who hover close. If we put up signs while the current tenants are still there, however, the mail carrier stops delivering mail, which we learned the hard way and is a bummer.

Kelsy,

Welcome from southwest Washington! I give 40+ hours a week of energy to Weyerhaeuser, headquartered near you. In the evenings and weekends energy goes toward landlording.

Spent a month in Thailand once, lovely place.

We would use the 30 day option to raise rent (M2M agreement, not lease) to recoup the increased costs moving forward, and are considering adding a clause that if the water is over a certain amount that they have to pay the extra, to be able to act faster. Two of our tenants have recently been informed that their water bills are higher than expected and we're going to raise their cost if next month isn't back down to normal levels.

I like to provide new doormats as a kind of housewarming gift, plus a fire extinguisher and any specialized floor cleaner. And a roll of TP hanging up. We clean the carpets (and charge them) if they don't leave a receipt proving they did, assuming we didn't tell them we'd be replacing the carpet so they don't need to. I consider 4 hours of cleaning for one year of tenancy to be the expected level, and charge them for anything above that.

Phil, welcome to Bigger Pockets! I'm down south, but my heart is still in Seattle. I currently have 2 great, 2 good, & 3 bad tenants, and one just moving in this week that we are hopeful for but time will tell. I guess that's not too bad of a distribution given that it is low income...

@Tom Goans , your approach scares the heck out of me, but I do appreciate the attitude adjustment. I'm not sure being so rigid is getting me very far, and it is easy to forget that my mission to make the neighborhood a better place includes how I interact with tenants and applicants. I am curious what information you do ask about for screening.

In my units.

Almost none of my applicants and tenants even have credit scores.

I still run credit, to look at who they owe money to (easier to discount rent to own, credit cards, and medical than utilities, judgments, etc) and to see if their addresses jive with the application (which they rarely do).

@Tom Goans, does aligning due dates to pay dates mean you are taking multiple payments a month? Do you build in any extra fees for being flexible with due dates or taking multiple payments? If a tenant gets paid on the 10th and normal due date is the 4th, how would you handle that? I hate waiting until the 10th to see if there is an issue.

I watch Craigslist to see what the local market will bear. I put myself on the high end of the range, but not over what others are asking for. In my experience, there are folks who get almost all of their deposit back and folks that still owe me a lot of money even after the deposit is applied, and very little in the middle where the amount really matters very much.

we paid a tenant $200 for keys, she needed gas money. Rent was $500. A lot of our tenants don't understand their "rights" to stay without paying.