Rental issues due to pandemic

[Sudip Biswas]

Question to the rental property owners, how's your rental properties doing during the lock-down and eviction moratorium? My experience has been mixed. Most of my properties are in Washington, Louisiana and Texas. My Louisiana and Texas tenants has been quite diligent in paying rent throughout the lock-down phase. Seattle has mixed scenario, with some tenants having their guests occupy the house, knowing eviction is pretty much impossible at this time.

[Bobby Lee]

Sudip, take it as a learning experience. Either (1) you need to look upmarket when looking for new properties or (2) you need to reevaluate how you screen tenants. Are you good at "reading" people? What kind of background checks or reference checks did you do?

Back when I was in graduate school I lived in a fourplex, across the hall were some undergrads. Total party animals, made a mess of the place and even broke a window before they moved out. Total headache for the landlord. We were on great terms with the landlord so he'd tell us some horror stories about those boys. I listened and empathized, though I liked them since I got to party with undergrads. :) But I would not want them as my tenants either. Landlord told me they had shown up dressed nice, spoke well and respectfully. So sometimes bad tenants are just hard to identify - that may just be what you got yourself into also.