All Forum Posts by: Minna Hu

For my properties, apartments buildings that are more than 6 units "enjoys" commercial rate, meaning higher rate for insurance, property tax. Besides that, it has no difference than apartment buildings with 6 or less units (residential). 

We have commercial units for leasing as well, I felt a lot different than leasing a residential unit, longer vacancy between tenants, different landlord and tenant regulation, and need to consider customer traffic for those commercial tenants. We just agreed to merge 2 commercial units to create space for one commercial tenant, and plan to do renovations to fulfill the new tenants' needs. Of course the new tenant cover part of the cost for renovation.  

my agent tells me before she listed our apartments, what needs to be done to get better price or better tenants, such as flooring, new counter top. I don't remember that she ever told me any feedback from the viewing, I guess every tenant has their own preference, we don't need to address them to get that specific tenant. 1 month is not long for leasing a house, isn't it? The turnaround of my apartments is usually 1 month, or 2 sometimes.

does it mean that after 1 year, it is safe to rent the unit out, and there won't be fine?

Saw a post of old news, Ontario minister of housing looks at strengthening protections for landlords, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/landlord-tenant-board-rental-kingston-animals-1.3876870, I am not always in Ontario, so cannot tell. Folks, did you see any change made to protect landlords?

Yeah, it would work, some landlords that I know are already doing it. It would be a great journey to find the subcontractors that you like and work for you. 

At beginning, you may not want to handover to the subcontractors without any supervision. I would still receive calls and emails from tenants regarding the maintenance requests, and forward to the subcontractor after I screen out unreasonable requests. For working with other contractors for more complex jobs, if the subcontractors are going to find quotes for you, you may require several quotes and decide which one to go.

Anyway, no one cares about your property and your income vs expense better than you, delegate is a good way to develop your business, but supervision keeps it under control. Supervise, but not micro-manage, haha, that is another topic regarding how to delegate.

Did you call those companies and ask why do they support lifetime warranty?

Tenants that are picky on every single thing, and use f** words when they call you and email you? For the first months when we took over our properties from property manager and started to manage ourselves. There are 3 or 4 tenants like this, I felt stressed and nervous about seeing tenant emails. Later we found that we don't need to suffer when we see their emails, we give their cease and decease notice for harassment, and said it will go into their file, then they stopped.

Tenants who are picky on every small repairs, and called city for inspection, city came in and picked out 20 items for you  to repair, and costed you money for non-sense? one tenant said she has bed bugs, we sent pest control for 3 times, and didn't find any bed bug, he called city, and city said even he caught bed bugs some place else and placed into a jar, and showed to the inspector in the apt, we have to do a bed bug treatment?

Property manager put tenants into your apartment without background check, and we had to evict most of them for non-payment, harassing us, etc.? Property manager did repair for your apt for 10k, and when we took over and saw nothing being done?

Oh, misery likes company, looking forward to all replies.