All Forum Posts by: Jane Z.

Thanks. Very good point. I thought about waiving her late fee completely if the rent is submitted today, but then I am afraid I may appear too "soft". What you suggested is exactly what I had in mind.

After thinking through the issue, I have decided to offer the tenant 50% of the late fee bcause she communicated early and promtly. I also offer moving her future rent schedule from 3rd to 5th without incurring late fee. So far the tenant is very appreciated and will submit rent tomorrow.

Michaela,

Yes. I live in Georigia and the company I copied my lease from is myhomespot.com, who managed my properties before. They don't base their late fee on the rent amount, but a flat fee on all properties. According to their late fee policy, they start to charge late fee $75 the first day past the due date, no grace period. I thought that is too harsh and have modified my lease to allow three day period. However, since that company has managed so many properties and seems having a good reputation, I assume they must know their business.

My late fee structure has always intented to preventing tenants from ever being late, not really collecting the money. That is the reason I feel uncomfortable to collect the late fee again even though the tenant told me she is ok with it. I try to come up a solution to accommodate her paycheck schedule so I could avoid this late fee if possible without being taken advantage by the tenant.

Thanks again.

Thanks Michaela and Michael a lot for your suggestion. That approach does require some effort since I set up all rent payments through eRentPayment.com. I will give it a try if there is no better approach.

I copied my late fee structure from a PM company I used before. Since that company manages more than 500 properties, I assume all the terms on their lease are legal. Then again, out of 8 properties I own, this $185 is the only late fee I ever got to collect. Other payments are always on time.

I have one tenant who has been on time with rent payment since the start of her lease in January. However, since her paycheck schedule changed from 15th/30th to every other Friday in Nov, she has difficulty to pay her rent on time. In early October, she notified me that she could not pay the rent on 1st per her lease. Instead, she will pay on Nov.8th with $185 late fee. So I asked eRentPayment.com not charge her on 1st, instead charge her rent payment plus $185 on Nov. 8. This went fine in Nov. Then in late Nov, she said she may have problem with paying rent on 1st because she will not get her paycheck until Dec. 5th. By the time she told me, it was too late to change the schedule. As expected, the payment was bounced back due to insufficent fund. Because she could not get her paycheck until Dec. 5th, she asked me whether she need to pay rent payment plus $105 late fee if she pays on Dec. 5th. She has been a good tenant and I prefer not charging her late fee in the future. But I am not sure how I could change my rent payment schedule to fit her paycheck schedule since she gets paid bi-weekly and we charge the rent monthly. For now I change her payment schedule to 3rd from 1st, but that still does not solve the problem. Her lease is two years. So we still have one more year to go.

Do you have any suggestion? I could tell her not to live paycheck by paycheck, but then this does not solve the problem either.

Thanks.

I like Mr. Landlord better. It is cheaper and you have more control.

Before we decide to buy a property, we always ask our agents sending us 4 comp reports from mls - rental CMA, rental listing sheet, sales CMA and sales listing sheet for the last 3 years in the same subdivision if available. The reason we ask for last 3 years is that we would like to see the rent trend during the 3 years period in the same community to gauge the neighborhood direction. We also take a close look of the pictures of each rental property listed so we could have a realistic rent target with the one we plan to buy.

Price certainly is a main factor. However, if you are lucky, there could be other factors. One of REO houses I bought had been on the market for a long time with good condition in a very nice neighborhood. The only problem is google maps. The google maps somehow put this property in a remote location no one cares about. I insisted to take a look of this property because I was curious on why the location of this property is almost out of state boundary. When we submitted our very low offer just for testing, they immediately accepted it. I wonder whether we were the only one ever submitted an offer. Then there is another time that the listing agent put incorrect property description. Instead of 2 car garages, he puts 2 car carports, which definitely limit some people's search results.

The reason I try to figure this out is that we are considering purchasing more SFRs if Atlanta rental market is strong. One of our real estate agents also works as a property manager. He only manages 8 properties, but he experiences the same thing as well and even increases the rent. I know last year he had difficulty to find good tenants and had to decease the rent. With Atlanta market so competative these days, we definitely need to increase our price target if we want to purchase more. We just want to make sure we don't read market signals incorrectly.