webLOGfor.US

    I subscribe to a Philosophy that if you find a good tenant, you do everything in your power to keep him/her.  If you find a lousy tenant, get rid of them quickly!  This has been the case with one tenant of mine.  He is currently in a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom condominium I own.  He has been my tenant for just about 3 1/2 years and is ideal.  I rarely ever hear complaints from him regarding things, he pays his rent on time and is extremely clean.  He truly takes care of the property.  

    I haven't raised the rent on this guy for the entire time he has been there.  It is now time to raise the rent to try and get it closer to maret value.  The common knowledge is that if you raiuse rents above 30 to 40 bucks, you may lost a tenant.  With that in mind I have decided on a $35 per month increase, which still leaves the unit well below market rates.

    Interestingly, I was ready to provide a letter to this tenant to raise his rents in December but before I could talk to him about it he told me he would be moving.  Being the person that I am, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't anything wrong with the condo itself, location, troublesome neighbors, or possibly something I did.  Good for all of us that it was nothing like that it was a happy occasion.  He was going to be getting married.  This was a second marriage for both of them and both had sons from the previous marraige.  Her's would be living with them full time and his comes over every weekend.  They needed a 3 bedroom.  The date was set for the end of April and they were looking to move into a place in May.

    Cha-ching.  I had a 3 bedroom coming on the market, close to where they are now and offered it to him.  It was a stretch of my time as I expected to have the place ready to rent in Mid-May but I figured I could step up the efforts and get it done a couple weeks early.  He was interested, they came to look at it and wanted to take it.  With that I saw no reason to offer him the letter to raise the rent.  I would re-rent it out at market rate and ke was taking the new place at market rate.

    As many things happen the deal fell through.  The marriage actually fell through and he ended up staying in the condo.  It was a bit of a relief because I was working at breakneck speed to get the unit ready for rental and this game me a little bit of time to move at a slower pace.  This is the house that I am currently finding tenants for.

    Why the long back story?  Well because it got me thinking of ways to raise the rent for tenants and not lose them.  I read a lot of articles where landlords send a terse leter sent stating rent will be raised on XX date by $XX amount to a total of $XX per month.  I think this impersonal approach is an easy way to lose tenants.

    In my letter to raise rents, I take the time to personalize it.  I give the details on the increase that the terse letter has but I also give detaisl as to why.  for me, it was an increase in codo fees, insurance and a large maintenance cost that was the cataluyst for the increase.  I let the tenant know that I appreciated them as as tenant, they way they took care of the property and that I hope they know that it was a purely business decision to raise the rest.  I also list the percentage of the increase in the letter.  I think that having a small number like that to equate the increase to shows that it is not that high of a number.

    With all that said, I am preparing myself for the normal things that come after a rental increase letter.  It's usually a bunch of the small things that need to be repaired that the tenant has decided to live with.  In my past experiences it's been things like light switches or outlets not working, broken pull cords for ceiling fans, etc.  The petty things that a tenat can help them justify the increase in rent.  I'll keep you updated as to any of the calls or requests I get about the increase.

web log for us – those that take the time to give a personal tough…..it's not all business 

    As with many things in life, I try to re-use as much information as possible.  Leveraging is important with information as it is with money.  I am of the complete mindset that while I may be an innovator and leader in my small piece of the real world, I am not when it comes to the rest of humanity.  Someone somewhere has run into the same problem/situation/event/etc that I have somewhere else.  If I am lucky, they have posted about it on the Internet.

    I consider one of my strong points the ability to find information on a topic, read that information, assimilate it and apply it to my own situations.  It was in one of these quests where I came across a document that was in Word 2003 format that had the read only password protection turned on.  I could not cut, copy, or change any of the text of the document.  Needless to say there was a good bit of information that I thought was worthwhile and could be reused in what I was doing in this document.  I needed to find a way to remove the read only password from the Word 2003 document.  After a bit of research on the Internet I came across this tiny tidbit of information.  Here are the instructions in case you ever find yourself in the same situation.

Note that this is only for the read only password protection of Word files with Word XP or 2003.  If the password is for the opening of the file, this will not work.

1. Make a backup copy of the document.  that way if it gets all corrupted you still have the original you can read.
2. Change the document to view it in HTML code.  You can do this by  pressing the ALT+SHIFT+F11 keys together
3. Hit the F3 key and search for the word "password" (without quotes)
• You should find something like this:
• <w:DocumentProtection>ReadOnly</w:DocumentProtection>
• <w:UnprotectPassword>1602952A</w:UnprotectPassword>
4. Delete these two lines
5. Save the document
6. Close the HTML editor and the word document
7. When you next open the document the password should be off.  if not you have one more step.
8. Go to Tools –> Unprotect Document

There you have it.  If you have any questions, let me know.  Good luck.

web log for us – those that know the answer is out there….somewhere 

    In a previous post, Pre-Screening For the Right Tenant, I said that I did confirmation calls the day of the appointment to minimize no-shows.  This is a true statement which, until now, has always helped me as expected.  

    My current showings have landed me a ton of no-shows for appointments.  I'm not sure what to attribute it to.  Different group of people that I advertised to, younger than normal applicants, lower income prospective tenants, or just a general disregard for other's time.

   To counter this I have begun calling the appointments back 1 hour before the time to verify that they are coming.  It still has provided me a few no-shows, but at least I'm not wasting my time waiting for them too long.  It also gives me the ability to try and bump up any other appointments I may have as I rarely ever stop by to show the place for a single appointment.  I try and schedule them a half hour apart to give time to see the place, ask questions and fill out the application.  So far, this is has minimized the no-shows from it's record levels.

web log for us – those that show up for appointments when we make them