Dear Fellow Landlord,
My wife, Corinne, and I have been landlords for about eight years between us. And, yes, we've had a lot of ups and downs, just like all of the landlords we know. For example,
We seriously thought about doing an exorcism on apartment 4 in our fourplex because we were convinced it was cursed!
We just couldn't find a good renter for it! One tenant was seriously crazy, another one would call us up day and night to yell at us on the phone, and the last one never paid rent! Sound familiar?
We used to be consumed by problems with our few rental properties…
Back then,
- I worked on bookkeeping, bills and records for our rental properties late into the night, just to make sure there was money coming in and the bills were being paid.
- We all, including our boys Ben and Gabe, worked all day every weekend repairing and upgrading our rentals when a tenant left the apartment dirty and busted up.
- Once the apartment was fixed, we would sit around and wait for the phone to ring on our "For Rent" classified ads, hoping that the caller would be qualified AND like the neighborhood AND want to rent from us.
- When someone finally rented from us (2.5 months was our longest vacancy!), we had to hope they would pay. Most often we had problems almost right away.
It got so bad that about 6 months ago…
Corinne bluntly told me she wanted to get rid of all of our rental properties!
First, I was shocked; stunned. Then I realized what I had to do: fix our property management business and the problem renters that possessed us. What Corinne was really telling me was that our rental business was killing us by taking away our lives. And for us to be happy, we had to fix the business.
We had to make our landlord business fit our lives, rather than us fitting into our rental business. That became my burning desire... To own a property management company, not a handyman job.
And We Did Turn Around our Landlord Business! How?
We made little improvements, here and there. As a fellow landlord, you know that change doesn’t happen overnight. But I just kept plugging away, determined to make this a real business we could enjoy, rather than barely survive.
And now,- I work on our bookkeeping and records SYSTEMS occasionally because just about everything is as automatic as possible – and in the process…
reduced that workload to only about 4 hours per month!
We hold regular planning meetings to make sure that the things we worked on were the most important ones. In the process..
we eliminated tons of trivial work we were doing - We made some major changes regarding rent payments and
haven’t any major rent payment issues since - We completely changed the way we find renters. Now we get plenty of responses on our ads from good quality people, and in one case…
filled one apartment the very same day the previous tenants moved out!
The turnaround in rental business has been dramatic.
We're now expanding comfortably. I've even played golf a couple times a week for the past couple of months or so. And Corinne says she's relaxed and happy with our business, knowing that things will get handled and we won't be drowning in work and problems. Dare I say it,
We’re having FUN running our Rental Property Business!
And we want to share that with you.
We hope you enjoy the site. Even more, we hope you can learn from our mistakes and our successes.
And please, let us know how else we can help!
To Your Happiness,
Eric & Corinne
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