I am considering buying a rental in the county.Since the water and sewer bills are associated with the taxes at the year end , is there any way of passing these costs to the tenant (is it possible to get a periodical reading for both???) and if not how do you make sure that the tenants dont run your water and sewer bills to the roof?
Baltimore County is great for rentals but the water billing is the absolute worst. Water bills seem low to tenants, but only because of some slick accounting. Sewer charges (the most expensive part of the bill...often 3-4x the water bills) are applied to the tax bill the following year. For a family that uses lots of water it can easily be $1,000/year. Most tenants can't afford this in one giant lump sum payment so I bill them quarterly based on water consumption. (This also encourages tenants to conserve water.)
The water charges on the most recent Baltimore County property tax bills invoiced owners for sewer charges at a rate of $6.24 per unit of water + $122 flat charge.
The water bills identify how many units of water were consumed. So you could bill tenants at $6.24 per unit.
The other crummy way the County bills for water: there is no online portal for bill retrieval and if you lose a bill you must contact the city to request a water billing history. (Because the City provides many parts of the County with water.)
I've attached an image of water billing history as an example. Hope this helps.
The simplest way is to just write a flat fee for water / sewer into the lease as a line item. I did this at a rental in Atlanta, and it worked pretty well. Some months we made a few extra bucks, and some months we lost a few. In the end, we pretty much broke even on the costs and there was zero work or cap-ex (sub-meters etc) involved. Hope it helps!
Personally, I've never heard of paying utility bills one time during the year. In Virginia, it's always billed monthly which would be easy to pass on to the tenant. You may try visiting the water authority (or whoever does the billing) and see if the tenant can sign up for water and sewer under their name and separate it from the tax bill. Surely there are other rental properties in the area dealing with the same issue. Other than that, it's going to be a constant battle between you and the tenants on usage.
Baltimore County is great for rentals but the water billing is the absolute worst. Water bills seem low to tenants, but only because of some slick accounting. Sewer charges (the most expensive part of the bill...often 3-4x the water bills) are applied to the tax bill the following year. For a family that uses lots of water it can easily be $1,000/year. Most tenants can't afford this in one giant lump sum payment so I bill them quarterly based on water consumption. (This also encourages tenants to conserve water.)
The water charges on the most recent Baltimore County property tax bills invoiced owners for sewer charges at a rate of $6.24 per unit of water + $122 flat charge.
The water bills identify how many units of water were consumed. So you could bill tenants at $6.24 per unit.
The other crummy way the County bills for water: there is no online portal for bill retrieval and if you lose a bill you must contact the city to request a water billing history. (Because the City provides many parts of the County with water.)
I've attached an image of water billing history as an example. Hope this helps.
We do what @Joshua Feit does on our 6 unit. When we first bought it we were paying for all water/sewer, but have since switched to a monthly fee of $25 per month per unit. It doesn't get us all the way there, but it's improved our NOI quite a bit so far and as many of the current tenants leave we can change this even more if we need to. It's not a perfect solution as if someone wants to take 8 showers a day and do the neighborhoods laundry we are in trouble, but for now it's working well. This is probably the easiest path for a quick fix, but maybe not a long term solution. Best of luck.