All Forum Posts by: Stephen E.

I posted in this thread three years ago and at that time was using Kwikset smartkey locks. Until I had them start to act up and lock out on me. On one turnover rekeying ended up where neither the new key nor the old key would work. My handyman was present and he went off and bought a new lock, but that was it, I was through with these locks. A lock that leaves me with a property that is unsecured is a lock that is failing in my view. I switched to Landlordlocks iCore system and have had no problems. The core of the lock switches out through use of the control key and so rekeying is literally a matter of seconds. The locks have proved to be very reliable. They are competitively priced and the service is great. Plus I now have a master key for my units. I am very pleased with the change and have no regrets in moving away from the unreliable locks I had been using. 

@Kelly Bellini I would reject both and move on to the next applicants. There are stronger tenants out there and it sounds like your unit is desirable. Your life will be a lot easier if you are patient and look for a strong candidate to be your tenant. Bad tenants can cause you terrible problems and both these candidates are relatively weak in my view. The problem with weak tenants is that their problems become your problems.

@Kelly Bellini How long have you been looking for tenants? The first candidates are inexperienced and as others have noted their rent would be doubling in moving to your property. The second candidates have two accounts that have gone to collections. They have a habit of not paying bills, maybe they won't pay yours. I would keep looking if I were you. Bad tenants are bad news, it is far better to forego a month's rent and keep looking than it is to let in a marginal tenant and have to deal with the problems they bring you.

@Richelle Bryan The sheer number of rentals may be less important than the vacancy rate. If those 200 units are all pretty much full up then this is a nice high demand rental neighbourhood. But if landlords are going begging for tenants, cutting rents and lowering screening standards in an effort to fill vacancies then this is a very different picture. Time to do some homework and learn some more about the case facts concerning this particular example.

@Samantha Soto the smoke alarm tampering tenant has to either desist this practice or pack his bags and go. There is no middle way here. @Thomas S. is right on this one, your liability as a landlord is real in this case. If there were to be a fire and it was discovered that you knew that the tenant was in the habit of tampering with smoke alarms and that your response was inadequate you could be prosecuted, fined, sued, jailed, the list is endless. My first action would be to immedately install sealed ten year lithium battery smoke alarms throughout the property and institute a frequent inspection program to ensure that they are not interfered with. At the first sign that they are I would issue the relevant legal notice to cure, and immediately fix the tampering. I would continue in this manner until the tenant either got the message and complied totally or until the tenant was evicted.

I would also review and inspect the condition of all smoke alarms in the rest of the property and consider replacement with sealed ten year lithium battery models there also. It sounds as though fire safety was not top of mind for the previous owner. This is a serious concern for you as landlord and is literally a life or death matter. All of these are urgent items - many residential fires occur around the holidays. I would get a handyman in there with a cordless drill installing new alarms ASAP. Here in Ontario fines for missing alarms vary by locality but from the newsfeeds I monitor if a fire department finds a landlord with a missing smoke alarm or a dead battery fines levied can be $3,000 or so per alarm per instance. I do not know what the situation is in Indiana but I suspect the authorities do not smile on negligent landlords especially if negligence is revealed in an actual fire with damages, injury or even death.

@Keith Smith Landlord Locks icore series. The cylinders can be user replaced in seconds and so you can change the locks yourself in between tenants in a moment or two. You can have them set up as a master key system so that you have one key to access all of your rental units, which is efficient and saves carrying large bunches of keys around. Being able to easily change locks enhances security for new tenants at turnover time. Being able to change locks yourself reliably is very important and cannot be taken for granted with other systems. I used to have Kwikset Smartkey locks installed but if you read around you will hear about how they can lock up on you when you go through the process to change keys. It happened to me when I was turning a unit over and neither the new nor the old key would work the lock. For this to happen once is too often as far as I am concerned. When it comes to security I want a system that is absolutely rock solid and trouble free. I spoke to my locksmith about it and he told me he has a couple of buckets full of failed Kwikset Smartkey locks that he has had to remove for customers.

I have been systematically replacing Kwikset Smartkey locks at turnover with Landlord Locks iCore locks and selling off the used Kwikset Smartkey locks on Ebay for a few bucks each. They are no good to me. Service from Landlord Locks is top notch. They are efficient, polite and know their business well. I am a happy customer and much better off with this robust product.

@Mitchell Smith The sub 550 credit rating is a warning to you. You don't want to go through an eviction as a rookie landlord. The way to avoid one is to have rock solid screening standards. There are tenants with more solid financial foundations and better credit scores. She earns $6,300 a month but has only $2,000 in the bank? This is not a desirable tenant.

@Thomas S. spells things out quite clearly regarding Ontario. Under the Residential Tenancies Act it is illegal to hold any deposit other than last month's rent. There was a court case that said that if a tenant themselves volunteered to pay rent in advance as a means of reassuring a landlord as to their desirability as a tenant than it was OK for a landlord to accept, providing this came solely at the initiative of the tenant and was not made a condition of a tenancy decision by the landlord. You can immediately see the problem here - a crooked tenant wanting to back out of such a prepaid rent arrangement need only file with with the Landlord and Tenant Board claiming that they were required to make advance rent payments under duress by the landlord and hey presto - a full refund is due. Plus potentially sanctions for the landlord. 

I have never accepted tenants with prepaid rent because it is against my screening standards to do so and because it is effectively against the Residential Tenancies Act to do so as explained above. Recently  I have had two undesirable prospective tenant applicants flash cash before my eyes in an effort to get me to take them as tenants. One offered to pay several months rent up front in exchange for tenancy. That tenant proved to have concealed prior addresses and a troubled tenancy featuring late and nonpayment of rent culminating in a midnight flit on a one year lease. Corporate landlords can afford to have a certain percentage of their units go bad like that. As a small landlord one bad unit is a greater proportionate loss and so I exercise greater care. The second guy was very eccentric, acknowledged any credit check would reveal a bad credit history including he claimed lawsuits. He offered a large sum of cash then and there in exchange for keys and proposed he would move in from the hotel he was occupying. No. These are not desirable tenants and their cash comes at far too high a price, and as Thomas explains it would probably have to be returned in any case. But as he also notes, these up front cash offers do seem to be proliferating amongst professional tenants in Ontario and are out there for the unwary.

 This is a strange mix of pop psychology and patronising comment. Interpreting the tenant's domestic circumstances, relationships or other such stuff is not the issue. Assessing likelihood of consistent rent payment and upkeep of the property is. As has repeatedly been pointed out by myself and other posters, there is a very good reason this prospective tenant is willing to pay a year's rent up front: she knows that she will be perceived as a bad risk by a knowledgeable landlord based on case facts. There is a very bad reason that a landlord might take her up on this offer: a landlord's short term hunger for cash. When the cash runs out there are no guarantees than another payment will ever be voluntarily be paid.

Whenever a prospective tenant offers to prepay rent I know its trouble. Landlording is about choices: choices of properties, choices of management policies, and choices of tenants. If you choose tenants who flash cash you will be self selecting troubled individuals to reside in your property. Good luck @Tim Porsche

@Tim Porsche When the up front cash runs out you would just be left with a bad credit risk who is stiffing the creditors she has already, again.  Remember this is a repeat performance, she is a bankrupt. The promised up front payment is blinding you to this reality. I just had to chase a bad tenant through the courts for $7,000 in damages. As I was driving back and forth having served their paralegal with yet more evidence and having driven to the court house to file yet another Affidavit of Service I swore to myself that there would be no more marginal tenants. Everyone would have to have squeaky clean credit, rock solid landlord references and no behavioral issues. Your tenant does not have these desirable features and is trying to compensate for her deficiencies by blinding you with money. Your eagerness suggests that it is working. She would not offer to pay up front if she thought a landlord would take her application ordinarily as is because she knows that all her characteristics add up to being bad news to landlords who are paying attention. I promise you that evictions and small claims for damages will be sheer torture and will have you rueing the day that you took her money. If you want to get a taste of what it is like, go out and burn $1,000 in $20s in your back yard. If you don't feel sick, do it again. Repeat until you get an overwhelming feeling of senseless waste. Now you know what walking into a really bad tenant situation is like. Once you have been there you realise prevention is far better than cure. You are being given a choice here.