The last few weeks have been pretty bust for me. In my personal life I have been swamped. I was literally going from 8am through until just past midnight Saturday and then back out at 8am on Sunday and got home around 6pm. A very long weekend and when you add in that I was tossing and turning all night Saturday into Sunday I am exhausted. Anyway, on to some updates. The house has been rented. The tenants are a couple moving to a larger place from a studio apartment they have in the city.
They seem like nice people, so they passed the "gut" test. For the rental criteria, they passed everything. Financials were OK, current landlord for one gave a great reference.
The guy currently splits time between his parent’s house and his girlfriend. She has a loft apartment which makes it a tight fit for them both to live there. His financials were good, everything on credit looked good. I wasn’t able to get a hold of his previous landlord from another state. That was something that gave me cause to give a second thought.
For the lady, she was OK with her financials. No recent delinquencies. Not a great credit score but an OK score. Current landlord gave a good recommendation. Pays on time, no issues at all. The current landlord and I got into a conversation about how there aren’t many landlords now that call and check references. It’s refreshing to talk to someone else who does. The previous landlord gave a mediocre recommendation. She said that the place was kept nice, rent was paid on time and they even gave a full refund of the security deposit. The issue that she had was the tenant was in a tumultuous relationship and this caused social issues (arguments, etc). I’m not sure if this is the current relationship she is in now. I didn’t really get the opportunity to bring it up in conversation and I really wasn’t that concerned with relationship arguments. Both candidates qualified for the place independent of each other so if there is a split, it should be OK.
Either way, the place is rented and I am back to full capacity. It’s nice to see the bank account for the rental business growing instead of shrinking.
We generally expect some things to be wrong when turning over tenants. I know I expect painting to need to be done if it is more than 2 years since the tenant moved in. This tenant was in the place just shy of 2 years and all the walls needed repainting. They also needed a good scrubbing.
There were some repairs that they had done such as a new bedroom door. I was told that one of the tenants put their hand through the door because it had been sticking. Either way, the new door is nice. Unfortunately there are issues. First, the casing around the door was damaged when they went to replace it. Second, when they were removing the old door it looks like a chunk of the header was ripped off. Nothing that would be structural to repair, but definitely cosmetic as the all the wood is stained and not painted.
2 areas of rug had to be steam cleaned, the back bedroom and the upstairs hall. The movers put a decent sized ding in the ceiling that needed repairing, etc. The bulk of the items were small.
One big issue I had was with holes in the wall from nails. They were proactive in that they attempted to fill the holes. Doing the final inspection I saw that the repairs needed to be sanded and I could have filled it better myself so it would not have needed sanding but they get an A for effort. Long story short the A turned to an F when I went to sand the stuff. Whatever they used never cured. It remained pliable like chewing gum. I ended up digging all the stuff out of the holes, sanding what was stuck on the walls with my orbital sander then refilling the holes. What would have been a 20 minutes job if they left the holes turned into about 3 hours. Not fun.
The other big item I have had trouble with was deodorizing for a cat. I know, I normally have a no pets policy. This tenant was good and worth it that I decided to take the chance on pets. The cat apparently liked the storage room…a lot. It became the litter box from the smell of it. Anyway, I have had success in the past with Odorcide 210 for pet odor removal. One treatment didn’t get rid of the odor so I gave it another shot. I’ll be heading back today to see how the smell is.
All in all I ended up with more damages that I expected. I am sure they will also be surprised by the number of charges on there.
Today I read this article about Sheriff Tom Dart in Illinois that is refusing to evict tenants from properties where the landlord was foreclosed. I agree with some of his ideas. Specifically the banks should know who is living in the property and there should be notification that the property is going into foreclosure. No tenant should find out by the sheriff going to their door to move them out.
What I do have a problem with is a sheriff not doing his job. His statement that "Until the banking industry steps up and does the right thing, I won't continue to risk violating the law and open taxpayers to further liability" is wrong. He admits he tried to lobby the legislature to pass a law which never happened. If he tried to get a new law passed why would he now say that he is worried about violating the law? It sounds to me like he is on a personal crusade and needs to uphold the laws on the books. Just because he was unable to get his own law passed does not mean he can ignore his duty.
On the flip side, there is this law which affects only three small areas within Philadelphia. Here city council passed a law that on certain blocks within a vicinity of one college students must live in owner occupied housing. Now you need to know that there are at least 6 major colleges or universities in Philadelphia. This law only applies to the houses near one of them. I can't see how a law can be passed only for certain parts of a city and not others. Someone needs to challenge the legality of this law and fight back.
web log for us – those that see some huge regulations coming for landlords in the future
We generally expect some things to be wrong when turning over tenants. I know I expect painting to need to be done if it is more than 2 years since the tenant moved in. This tenant was in the place just shy of 2 years and all the walls needed repainting. They also needed a good scrubbing.
Today I read