All Forum Posts by: Funyon Funyon

Can anyone recommend a great property management company in Rochester NY. My husband and I own 2 duplexes (all 4 units are 1 bedrooms)  in East Rochester and North Winton Village. We take very good care of the properties and are looking for a management company to find quality tenants and deal with any emergencies. 

We had a misunderstanding with a tenant (involving a transfer of a lease) and they failed to pay August's rent. (No one and everyone was at fault as it was legitimately a confusing situation.) He has paid all the other month's rent (sometimes a few days late but never more than this.) We all realized the error October 15th and let the tenant know that instead of insisting on the unpaid rent immediately or charging a late fee, we would give them until the end of the month (October 31st) to pay the back rent plus the rent for November. On November 2, we received 1 months rent (so I guess we put that towards Aug outstanding rent and technically he is now just 4 days late paying November 's rent and everything else has been paid) His lease states after the 5th of the month there will be a late fee and after 10 days he will receive a 3 day notice to pay rent. The tenant just sent us this message "as far as the back rent for August I'm not sure how long its gonna take for my case manager to help me but I can also start making an effort to pay it back as well before we have to go to court or anything..... I don't want this to be a long on going problem I just want the issue over with so we can all move forward thank you."  I am not sure what he is talking about re: case manager but would you set up a payment plan for this tenant and just increase the rent for the next X number of months or head toward eviction. The other thing I was thinking of was agreeing to set up a payment plan but requiring him to sign a new/different lease (he came with a lease that is far more lax than the one we usually use.)

Thanks for any insight!

Thank you so much to everyone who answered my questions. We are slowly learning.

Thanks for any thoughts on these three issues. Sorry this is so long.

We recently purchased a 2 apartment/1 commercial multi-use property that we discovered needs a lot of work. With the property we inherited 1 tenant and his fairly lax lease. We have 2 major issues with this tenant. The first is that he smokes cigarettes and pot (not legal here) in his apartment for which we have had complaints about (as the smell travels) from both the apartment above him and from the renter of the commercial space below him. There is no mention of smoking in his lease but we have informed him that we have gotten complaints from the other tenants and he is not to smoke anything in the apt or common spaces anymore. The problem has persisted and we are not sure as to what the next steps to take to address this issue.

This same tenant also has an unauthorized person living in this apartment. When asked he says that this other person is not living there but we have been over in his apartment (with permission) 5 times in the past week because of various work that needs to be performed and this other person is there every time we have been there to do work even when the tenant is not there. He is obviously sleeping on the couch. We live in NY and have had issues dealing with squatters before as they have a lot of rights here and do not want a repeat of this situation. We have told the tenant that there is no one else allowed to live in this apartment who is not on the lease but we are not sure how to proceed. Any advice?

We own another property and have a pretty landlord friendly lease for our mostly young student tenants. Part of our lease says No Pets. We had a tenant get a dog and only discovered this 2 days before she moved out. The dog has urinated on the carpet which will require replacement (professional cleaning did not get the stain/odor out) and possible replacement of the subfloor as well. Our plan is to take her security deposit to pay for the replacement of the carpeting and to write her an invoice for the remainder of the bill and take her to small claims court if she doesn’t pay the outstanding balance. My question is what can be done to prevent this from happening in the future as in tenants just ignoring their lease. If we walk through the apartments quarterly and notice or suspect things that aren’t right is there anything other then asking them to fix the problem or threatening eviction? Obviously it doesn’t take a long time for a dog to destroy an apartment, she only had the pet for a brief period. But what do you do if you have tenants that just ignore the rules meant to protect your property.

Thanks so much for any thoughts/ideas.