All Forum Posts by: Glen Wiley

It is a good idea to raise rent every year, even if it is a small amount. For example, if you raised rent by $25 a month that is not likely to trigger them moving but it does help control the gap that could develop between your rent and market rates.

Each year you skip widens the gap and makes it harder to close and more likely to trigger a move. $400 is tough to recover in one change without triggering a move.

I have learned the hard way that I really should not skip rent increases every year, even if they are small.

Given the frequency that I am hearing about these I decided to aArrange for a short term tenant to occupy the house the same day previous tenants move out. My oldest son is game, but you could hire just about anyone (think students) and pay them daily to stay.

In some cases I will stay at the house temporarily and just work from there while we find a new tenant. The inconvenience and expense is way cheaper than needing to boot a squatter.

Didn't a number of large brokerages settle as well? My understanding was that NAR was one of many:

I like the idea from @Clayton Silva - increase rent annually to get the amount up to market.

If you have a paying tenant with a long, good history, consider the cost of her moving: You lose at least 1, maybe 2 months rent. How long will it take you to make that back at the new market rate? In this case, 2 months will be $5,400 lost rent to vacancy. It will take 11 months to make back the lost rent at an extra $500 per month.

But wait, there's more! When you have turnover you will almost certainly have maintenance costs. Painting will be a huge cost unless you do it yourself (thousands of dollars).

I use apartments.com and zillow.com for processing payments including both rent and security deposits. The ACH transfers are slow but reliable.

Cash: dangerous to handle that much cash, easy to lose, have stolen

Checks: bounced check fees are a pain

Paypal and some other services: I have heard horror stories of accounts being frozen for weird reasons

SMH - nice of them to show their true colors before they rented :)

We charge a $200 non-refundable deposit for pets at lease signing and $50/month pet rent (on rents around $2000).

Late fees are $10/day starting at the 5th of the month.

My historic vacancy rates are around 1-2% (20 years) - I expect to sustain that level.

Look up what comparable properties are renting for today. Your rent increase should bring the current rent in line with the market. Most people will not move due to a $50-100 increase in a $1750 rent.

If your increase is too low then you will fall behind next year even further. Consider what the long term increases will look like if they stay and where the rent will be as a result. You can't increase by $200-250 to catch up without risk of them moving.

I did some more research and it loks like I was wrong about landlords being able to garnish tax refunds.

I usually give my tenants 12 filters at lease signing and then bring them more from time to time in follow up years.