Listing a unit before eviction?

Question

A question from a newbie....

I inherited a tenant whom has no job and has expressed concern about making next months payment.

Assuming I talk to him late in the month and he tells me he cant make rent.  Is there anything preventing me from starting to market the unit for rent while he still lives there?

I still have to talk to my attorney about the compete eviction process in Wisconsin and how long that is going to take....

Thanks.

Judy Parker · Answer

I agree with all the above commenters.  From years of experience I have learned to NEVER show a property until it is vacant, spotlessly clean and in move-in condition.

Kimberly T. · Answer

We never show a unit until it is completely vacant/empty and has been cleaned and is ready for move-in.  Like Steve said above, the soon-to-be-evicted tenant will not keep the place tidy, and anyone who's willing to accept the unit in that condition is not a tenant I want to rent to.  Showing the unit only in clean, move-in condition shows the prospective tenants what your standards are, and how you expect them to maintain the unit.  If they see the current tenant being less than clean, they'll think you're ok with that.

I know not every landlord operates that way, but that's how we do it.

Steve Rozenberg · Answer

I agree with James, we used to try and do this thinking we were outsmarting everyone and having a zero vacancy time. The reality is the only time your wasting is your own. For several reasons, I found these out the hard way of-course and learned them on my own.

First the odds of this person cooperating with you and not make the whole scenario look like a catastrophe is nil to none after they are served with eviction papers.

Unless this is the one person out of thousands that lives a perfect clean life and keeps his place in show quality it is probably not a place you want to show because ultimately that is a reflection of your business model and how they will percieve your upkeep of your units. And most importantly if the person viewing the home likes it and accepts it with the current state that it is in that is probably not the tenant you want anyway. We used to market bad credit ok, move in special if they did some work etc... basically that got us dead beat tenants, they would stay in the property for 2 months then skip.. the work they did was horrible and in the end we had to spend double the cost to fix what they broke and stole and it was mentally draining. You would think after several times we would have figured it out......

Finally we broke the code that was in-front of us the whole time. We make it a business practice to never ever show a home unless it is completely showable, Some people may disagree with this and show them early but we got burned so bad we went full scale the other way. I will say that because of how we do it now, we have minimal days on market and we get great tenants that truly care for the property. We have a 2% eviction rate with over 400 SF homes where as before we were averaging a 30% eviction rate...

The key to all this is putting the right person in the property at the right time, if you rush it  chances are you may get burned like we did several times before you figure a better mouse trap.

James Wise · Answer

You could start showing the unit while he is there, but there is no upside to doing so.

It will just create problems & waste time.