Rules to Follow for Landlords

I finally finished Brandon’s book on Rental Property Investing! And at the very end I found a gem of a link in his bio – Brandon has his own website. I want one! Seriously…

While I was exploring Brandon’s site, a few articles caught my attention. One was 13 Rules Great Landlords (Almost) Never Break.

We are on the right track with always screening, never rent out a dirty unit, turn over units quickly, planning for property management, hiring professions, and treat tenants with dignity.

I agree that require a security deposit and enforce the due date are great rules. I’m to the point where if the applicant doesn’t have the security deposit they don’t get the keys, because they never seem to recover and are often really bad tenants. Experience also shows that as soon as a tenant gets late on rent, it often means that they are spiraling into a worse situation.

Conceptually we agree with keeping our business and home life separate, creating systems, and planning ahead for expensive fixes, but in reality we aren’t very disciplined about them.

And this year we are doing really poorly at documenting everything and keeping current with our accounting. I could make excuses, I could vow to do better, but for now I think we keep rolling with it and making the best of it…