All Forum Posts by: Laura Stayton

Hello, I am working on a project and I am curious what is common practice to deal with maintenance requests from tenants? Do you have tenants enter the request via software? (If so, which one?) Do you accept calls? Texts? Emails? What is your workflow to handle these requests? Any feedback would be appreciated. 

Team, I am looking to beginning to self-manage my first rental, as I am actually moving not too far away from it with my second unit in about a month. What would be the best way to do this, and what challenges might I face? In my mind, I anticipate calling my PM and letting her know, and giving her a website that she can relay to the tenants for their future rent payments, work orders, questions, etc., and I'd pull the current leases and docs, upload them to what will be their new rent payment portal, and roll from there. 

This will significantly increase my cash flow, and I now have the capacity to feel comfortable doing so. Any advice is appreciated!

Hi all!

This is my first time posting something here. I'm kind a newbie. I bought my first and only rental 2 years ago in Cleveland (I live in CA). The former PM found a tenant quickly. They left in December (without paying the last month). I had to spend a lot of money to renovate the house and the garage was totally destroyed. 

The new PM can't find a new tenant (32 days on the market and 216 view but no application) and right now I am hemorrhaging money.

It is a single family home - 3 bd/1ba - 993 sqft - with backyard. $915/month

Do you have any advice?

I currently own a fourplex and have raised the rents for all units over the last two years of owning the property, but the rents are still below average for the area. If I decide to raise the rents again, are there any laws that I have to raise the rents for all units at the same rate? All units are approximately in the same condition and size, also all of the tenants are longer term tenants. One of my tenants is also a plumber and does a lot of work for me at a discounted rate, so I dont want to raise his rent as high as the others. I do have one tenant that is on Section 8. So the question is, can I raise one or two of the tenants rents, without raising the others? Is that discriminatory to the other tenants? Thank you in advance! 

I have two young tenants with little credit history wanting to rent one of my units. One of their mothers has agreed to be a cosigner. She’s solid with a good income. Do I have all three sign the lease or just the occupants?

Hi BP Fam,

There are many different platforms available for advertising your rental, but it can be overwhelming to decide which one to use. 

Do you have any experience with marketing a rental property? If so, where did you have the best success? Have you had good experiences with any particular rental listing sites? 

Thanks in advance 

Hello,

I am newer to biggerpockets and still looking to do my first investment.  Rates are just so high right now that it is making it difficult to pull the trigger on anything.  I actually do background screening and investigations for a living and was curious of the process for most landlords.  I am noticing that most people are just doing criminal, eviction records and credit checks.  

Again, having knowledge of doing background screening for a living I am trying to figure out why most landlords are not doing Civil records searches?  Does anybody know why these are not standard on tenant screening?  Eviction records would likely show up in any civil records searches, but would give so much more information on tenants.  For example if you ran a civil search you may discover the applicant may have a restraining order against them or are be involved in multiple civil lawsuits, domestic issues, or being sued for anything else.  Most of this stuff will never show up in the criminal courts because with civil, those are "person vs person" and technically anybody can claim anything against anybody even frivolous lawsuits that would not show up in criminal.  With that said, as a landlord I feel that would be extremely important to know if someone has been sued by 3 or 4 different people for not paying them or having domestic issues.  

Maybe someone with more experience here can explain why I do not see civil screening as part of the regular process.  Lastly, my company also does social media screening.  Wouldn't this be important to run as well?  I would really like to learn why these are not standard.

Thank you!

Ok, thank you everyone. I have a regular toilet lid. She wanted me to install safety feature to lock it with lid lock. So my question was whether it was my responsibility.