All Forum Posts by: Daniel Miller

I have just rented my father's home to a new tenant (Thank You all, very much, for all your advice and comments!! I checked them out thoroughly, and they look like excellent tenants).

The tenants would like to start moving in a couple of weeks before the lease actually starts. Since the house is currently sitting empty, I don't see any problem with that, and they are giving a generous security deposit anyway, they are going to hand me security deposit and first-month rent this weekend, well before they would be moving in.

What issues should I be aware of, if they are moving stuff into the house before the lease is in effect? I'm going to write to my insurance agent to make sure that the property insurance will be in effect, but I'm pretty sure it is in effect now anyway. They have a renter's policy for their own goods. Are there any traps here that I should be aware of?

I sent an email to the S.J. Water company, to get auto-pay cancelled on my dad's house that I'm getting ready to rent out. In the same message, I told them about the comments that I'd read about Water Districts putting a lien on a house if tenant did not pay a bill. Here's the reply I got, I thought y'all would be interested in it!

Good thoughts, all! Thanks...
I read at the Cal. Dept of Consumer Affairs that security deposit for unfurnished rentals cannot be more than two months rent; that should be a reliable source!! I'll probably go with the $100 over one-month rent method that several of you describe; that sounds like it will also help with the "apply deposit to last month's rent" problem that I've read about elsewhere.

I'll look at the various sites that you all mentioned, and see what numbers look like. My initial thought is that I'll price a little lower than I could, and hope that my tenant is happy with the price and the property. (if *anyone* could be happy with $2500+ rent!!)

I have an advantage here in that the mortgage is much lower than this, because it wasn't purchased for investment - my parents lived there for 40 years! The flip side, however, is that the reason I'm renting it at all is to build up a cache to pay for dad's assisted-living facility once his LTC insurance runs out in three years... So while I don't need to squeeze dollars to make this pay, I don't want to waste too much either...

I'm going to be renting out a 3BR/3Bath, 1977 sqft house in San Jose, CA. I got an estimate of rent on the house from Zillow.com, which did not allow for the solar panels or my inclusion of the gardener. Even so, I thought that $2889/month (that's what it shows right now) was awfully steep for renting a house!! Beyond that, I wasn't sure what to charge for deposit; I'd *like* to ask a little over 1 month's rent, let's say $4000... but that would make the move-in cost almost $7000 !!! Holy Cowpatties!! If they've got that kind of money, they'd just buy a house, right?

Beyond that, I don't know what to do to get estimates of these numbers. I note that Rentometer.com has a much more conservative estimate for rent than zillow.com, I'll be looking at its data more completely tonight.

In the meantime, how do you decide on deposit amount, relative to rent? On the one hand, that's a huge chunk of money, that they won't even get interest on. On the other hand, it's a big house and quite valuable, and it wouldn't take much to do $4000 worth of damage to the house. I would appreciate any guidelines on deposit evaluation...

Steve B.: If I recall the past usage correctly, the electric portion of the bill tended to be near zero after the solar contribution. Unfortunately, many of the big power users in the house (furnace, water heater, stove and oven) are gas, so the overall PG&E bill tends to be fairly substantial.

Unfortunately, the house has been empty since February, when we moved my dad into assisted living. I turned off the furnace at that time, so I don't have typical figures for the recent past. The bill has been auto-paid for years, I'll have to get into the PG&E online references and see what he was paying previously.

Jon Holdman: Thank you for the cue regarding rentometer.com ! I have some questions about rent/deposit estimation, but I'm going to start a new thread for that topic.

Thank you all for your assistance and thoughts!!

Okay, I understand this better, from these posts and some other reading I've done today. The house is a 3-bedroom, 3-bath, and in fact the rooms are pretty large. I'll probably modify the reference contract to allow two persons per room.

Steve Babiak; would you *really* including sleeping on the sofa as a long-term living option (i.e., include that in the lease contract) ?? That doesn't seem very viable to me...

I've been looking at a sample rental contract that I found on this website (though, oddly enough, I can't find that page right now...). There's one line I'm a little uncertain about... Section 14 (Occupants) says "the number of occupants is limited to two adults and two (2) children" ... the "two" is even highlighted in yellow.

Isn't this a discriminatory phrase?? I thought we couldn't exclude or limit children...

Okay, thanks for all the suggestions... I'll probably handle water as Rob K suggests... PG&E might be a little tricky because they have solar panels on the roof, I think that complicates the issue of turning off power... maybe I should talk to PG&E about it??

I've already decided to pay garbage myself, as well as the gardener. The rent is going to be so high already (I'm planning on asking $2800/month, for a 1977 sqft house with solar panels, in a nice neighborhood), I'm worried that it's going to be challenging for a family to pay, I don't want to pile too many other expenses on top of it...

I am getting ready to rent out my first house (it's my dad's house, he's in a dementia facility now). One basic question that I have: what, exactly happens with the utility bills once a renter moves in; do I change them all to the renter's name?? Or do I leave the accounts in my (well, dad's) name and just tell the renter to pay them?