All Forum Posts by: Susannah Vila

@Vatsal Patel dming you as well!

We have a free roommate agreement tool you can use:

https://caretaker.com/roommate...

Similar to the PM that @Joe S. is using, we decided to have each owner set their preferences for how we should coordinate their maintenance for them upfront: 

1. Choosing which service providers should be prioritized (i.e., "I trust these people for HVAC, always go to them first"

2. Specify how much we can spend before reaching out for your explicit approval. You can do this by individual work order, set a max budget for the whole year (we let you know if you're tracking towards going over, or both (both is recommended)

You'll also see the work orders and receipts but that's mainly because people need them for their taxes. 

Here's how we got around this problem and enable self-showings in occupied units: 

1 - Set up an autoresponder when anyone inquires. This isn't possible for your average person to do with FB marketplace but for every other listing site it's easy. 

2 - Tell the person that if they're interested they can book a showing. This could be either a self tour or not - if you're doing the showing yourself at least you will have avoided spending time trying to get tirekickers to setup a date. When you do this, also make the requirements incredibly clear. 

3 - Get a smart lock setup outside for self-tours. Let the current, outgoing tenant decide when it's okay for self tours to happen. Most of the time they'll choose time windows when they know they won't be home. Some tenants would rather be there, in which case they'll usually choose less time windows in the week - not ideal for filling a unit quickly, but better than nothing.

If this is all setup correctly then you actually won't have to do much work between posting ads and reviewing the first applicant.

There is one lockbox and deadbolt option that doesn't require wifi FYI: https://www.igloohome.co/en-us...

1. Choose a real estate broker to help you buy the home who you feel like you can develop a relationship with enough to be able to ask them to do small tasks like setup a smart lock for you or drive by the property to make sure there's nothing very obvious going wrong

2. Put the cost of smart lock installation into your numbers when you're analyzing the investment (it's never more than $500 with a shelf-life of around two years) so not huge but still a good idea to do it

3.Start asking around now for referrals to great members of your potential maintenance team: a handyman, a plumber, an electrician and a cleaner. The best of these people aren't listed on the internet because they get so much word of mouth business they don't need to. 

4. Then it just comes down to having a system that you never veer away from for getting a tenant, handling maintenance and enforcing lease terms. Certain parts of your system might be things that it would never occur to anyone to do if they didn't start out from the perspective of managing from afar - for example, a house cleaner will usually be happy to do a "deep clean" twice a year and do an inspection at the same time so you can stay in control of the physical condition of the unit. And tenants are happy to get free cleanings. 

@Vishal Shah did you put anything about subletting in the master lease? It might prohibit subletting altogether if you used a form lease from something like a Texas realtor association...it's completely legal to blanket prohibit subletting in Texas. 

Barring that, I'll echo what everyone else said: you should screen them using the exact same criteria you used to screen your current tenant. It's not worth it to try and come up with less stringent criteria under the thinking that the original tenant is still technically liable. 

Here's a free lawyer vetted sublease if you need it.

I would guess that these scammers are just booking showings like any legit renter would and passing off their codes to unsuspecting actual renters. This is why we (at Caretaker) require identity checks in order to book a showing. People take selfies and upload their IDs and software makes sure they match and can check databases for falsified documents, etc. 

Rently's pin codes last for at least a day which would make this scam lot easier to manage. That's why access codes that last for just 30 or 60 minutes are much better for self showings - less time for bad actors to get anything done.

I’d argue that it’s more useful for single family — they tend to be farther apart which makes the travel time back and forth to let people in more costly. Also, as someone who’s been a tenant in a unit with a Latch installed, it’s definitely a perk!

Counterpoints to the cons mentioned here:

• Yes, they require batteries, but they are the kind of batteries that can be easily bought at the grocery store and replaced by your tenant so it’s not a huge deal. I used my Latch deadbolt many times a day over the course of two years and the battery never died.
• Yea, the tenant’s code could be handed out to anyone...kind of like they could hand their key out to anyone. For one-time visitors it's a lot more secure as long as you get a deadbolt that creates duration-specific codes - they only last for an hour or two (or less) and won't ever work after that. Latch and IglooHome definitely have this feature.
• They pretty much all have sensors that alert you when they’ve been left open and automatically locks the door for you - just mentioning to underscore the point that they’re more secure than keys.

One additional CON not mentioned here:

• All the deadbolts except for one rely on WiFi, so this just means that between tenants you’d need to keep the WiFi active

Here’s what I’ve noticed (this is the perspective of someone who runs a self-showings app): 

1.  As soon as the pandemic started, video walkthroughs became the norm. Renters expect to see a link to a video and spend more time on their computers at home before they go look at anything in person. It was crazy how quickly this shifted.
2. People are taking less tours and they're more serious about the ones they do take. We’ve seen this everywhere from NYC to Tampa. Pre-COVID, the average number of showings per renter was roughly 5. Now, it’s closer to 2 - and they’re twice as likely to apply
3. Way less pushback about prescreening from renters. We used to get a few people a day complaining or bouncing because we ask for identity verifications, income, background check, etc. before showings. Now it’s more like one person a week.
   

So, TL/DR, renter behavior has indeed shifted a bit — the question will be if it holds!