All Forum Posts by: Tyson Luthy

Exactly. This is good advice. Decide how you would like to collect rent, and put fees/incentives in place to encourage ttenants.

Be careful not to get to creative with this, otherwise it can turn into an accounting headache.

Only put fees in place that you are willing to enforce. Put it in the lease, and always stick to what you have in writing.

----------------------

Also, yes. We do collect rent electronically (we also accept money orders and cashiers checks) but electronic payments are preferred!

This question depends a lot on your local market.

If you are charging less than market rent, then you need to compare the increased amount to potential vacancy costs and do what makes sense.

If you can only raise the rent $25/mo ($300/yr) but it takes a month to re-rent it - it may not make sense...

Usually, when the cost of vacancy is equal to the increase in rent, I go another year (if the tenants are good) then up it the next year.

Charge the market rent. The best landlords are FAIR and stick to a lease that protects both the tenants, and owners.

Don't let tenants walk all over you, and don't walk all over your tenants.

Charging market rent is the fair thing to do. Not more, not less.

Stick to your lease. If your lease says guests are allowed up to two weeks, then stick to that. After the two weeks are up, serve a lease violation and follow through.

Always stick to what you have in writing.

Does the lease specify who gets which bedroom? etc.

Stick to what you have in writing.

You'll want to be sure to get the ad right before you start accepting applications. When someone pays an application fee, THEN finds out that the rent is higher - people get mad.

We always start the price higher and begin marketing the property before the current tenants have even left. This helps us get a feel for demand before the property even becomes vacant.

Then, we monitor activity and make adjustments. There are a lot of things that can affect getting a unit filled. We always look at 3 things:

• Price - too high? too low?
• Presentation - good clean properties attract good clean people
• Exposure - are people seeing the ad? etc.

It sounds like from your situation that upping the rent may be a possibility. But if the unit is already vacant, you will want to weigh out the cost of a prolonged vacancy vs the increase in rent.

Good luck!

Congratulations on taking the plunge into buy and hold investing!

My team and I currently help manage over 1500 rentals, I'm happy to help any way I can.

The 3-day pay or vacate notice is what should be used every time in the event of non-payment. Serve it promptly, and then if they don't pay, you already have the paperwork going for the eviction.

Problem tenants, and tenants who can't afford the rent can usually be avoided with a good screening process.

Just move on. Get the place rent ready and re-rented to better tenants.

Good luck!

Does your lease say anything about lead based paint?

I don't know what the laws are in MA. But we have a lead-based paint clause built into our lease that we make them initial during the lease signing.

We don't ever provide them in our single family homes. They can be expensive to maintain, and in our market we can't get more in rent.

The less you leave in a home, the less you have to track and deal with.

I'd say leave them out. If the tenant is okay with paying more per month, why aren't they okay with just purchasing their own?

We use Craigslist, zillow, rentbits, etc. We have high volume and feed our listings out on a number of paid sites. The paid sites tend to yield the highest quality tenants, for rent signs bring a lot of phone calls, and not a lot of applications.

All of this is subject to your local market

We have found private showings and open houses to be a waste of time. We will often use lockboxes, and pre-screen people over the phone and give them the code to the lockbox. This saves HUGE amounts of time!

Whenever someone is interested, we ask them to fill out an application and pay the application fee online (another huge time saver). Plus, everything is automated, and documented. I would strongly suggest you use an online software that handles this.

We don't ever furnish our rentals. That is just more to track and deal with. In our market furnished rentals are not common either.