All Forum Posts by: Michael Butler

Oh my gosh. Those responses are so helpful!  I think my gut was right. We need to raise the rent and security deposit. If they don’t take it, we will gladly rent to a normal family situation. Thank you so much!!!!

Hi!

My wife and I are renting out our single family, 3 bed/2.5 bath ($2200/month) home in St Louis, MO in a historic neighborhood (Benton Park) as we move to a new home that we are rehabbing while living in. We are accepting applications currrently for a 1 year lease. One applicant is an employee of a small corporation where the owner of the company would be the name on the lease but the people using the property would be about 8 employees (we could probably get their names if we wanted to). Currently, those employees periodically pay for hotel rooms in STL, so this rental is their attempt to reduce the company’s costs of stay while it’s employees are in STL. I believe they typically have a few employees in the area for several days per week. Ie, not all employees are here all the time. 

Has anyone run into something like this before?  Should we put all employees’ names on the lease? Increase the monthly rent? Increase the security deposit? Decline the application? We have one other applicant who is so-so (615 credit score as she is recovering from a divorce, 4 daughters - oldest in high school, a boyfriend who is there 2 weekends per month (name not on the lease), 2 dogs. I talked to the current landlord who said she always paid on time and seemed to be on top of things)  

My biggest concern is that the people staying here will not treat the place as though it was theirs. We were thinking of monthly walk through’s or mandatory housekeeping. Sorry if this is too complex to answer in text form. 

We used Zillow for the first (and last) time last week. We did not receive the application. 

The potential tenant mentioned via phone that they were going to apply. We didn’t get it, so we texted them two days later saying we didn’t get it. Going back and forth for a week and us and them getting Zillow involved has not led to any results. Zillow says they are “looking into it”. That potential tenant informed us they will be looking at other properties to avoid this hassle. Net, we lost a potential tenant due to Zillow. 

Background: this is a $2200/month property. 

The good news is that we found some chinks in the communication capabilities. They are a young couple, not married. The latest text said that we would have to follow up with her boyfriend to get a question answered that had to do finances because that is “his department”.