All Forum Posts by: Bob H.

You certainly should change locks to be fair to tenants and to avoid being accused of negligence. I don't like the idea of moving locks around, either, unless you have a large number of properties distant from each other. In most areas it would be easy for a potential burglar to look up properties owned by the same landlord. Also, if you rent single-family homes, they have various numbers and styles of locks that should match.

I buy a rekeying kit from Change-a-lock or Prime-line, online or at a home center for $10 to $15. The kits have enough pins for six locks and come with two or three keys. It takes some practice the first couple of times, but you can learn to change all the locks in a house in maybe a half hour. This is cheaper, at least in the short run, than user-rekeyable locks from Kwikset, Schlage and possibly other manufacturers.

For more money, you could invest in electronic keypad locks and even some that allow remote control. I have not tried them, but they could be ideal if you need to allow one-time access to a repair person or you need to have frequent tenant changes, as in a vacation rental.

I had a two-bedroom house in California that had a tar-and-gravel flat roof on about two-thirds of the building footprint. Water would pool up, as in your case. I was surprised that it didn't leak more than it did.

At one point I laboriously removed all that gravel, bucket by bucket down the ladder, and got somebody on craigslist to take it. Then I coated the roof with a Henry elastomeric coating, a white, rubbery, thick paint that can take some kind of filler underneath it to level the roof a bit. It wasn't worth the trouble. The coating would peel off in places, and it still leaked a little.

Finally my wife and I broke down and got a foam roof. It was _way_ better and provided some much-needed thermal insulation along with the waterproofing. If you can afford the spray-on foam, go for it.

I have used Google Voice for several years. I make the calls go to both my home phone and cell phone. I don't give out the cell number, so I can change it at any time.

Recently I bought an Obihai OBi200 box for about $50 and ported my home number to RingTo, which, like Google Voice, offers free phone numbers. I paid $12 for annual E911 service and an additional $1.50 a month for an experiment with Callcentric to get caller names with the caller IDs. (Google Voice and RingTo don't support caller ID names.)

The result: Home phone service for about $30 a year, and both home calls and business calls ringing at home. I set up distinctive ring on the Obihai box to make the incoming lines sound different.

I also am considering cozy.co. I sent a few questions to the company's tech support team and received a very prompt, thorough reply. One down side I see is that tenants can't schedule payments near the end of the month so that I would get paid on the first or second day of the month. They have to schedule the transfer to start within the first five days of the month. The company says it takes four to six business days for a debit to go to the tenant's bank, funds to go to cozy.co and a credit to go to the landlord's bank. This is more of a delay than I have now with tenants mailing checks, but it's not as bad as having a property manager in the middle.

A 60-day notice is required by many big apartment complexes here in Texas. I think the long notice improves their ability to forecast vacancies, match rents to the forecast demand and squeeze a little more money out of tenants who fail to plan ahead.

I changed my leases to match the 60-day notice, because I want to advertise 60 days before a tenant is leaving so my rentals are available to people who do plan ahead and give a long notice. I also give tenants a 60-day notice of a rent increase. I typically show the house and try to sign a new lease while the current tenants are there, minimizing vacancy.

Unless it's very hard to rent your property, I don't understand why you need to accommodate a new tenant who wants to begin paying rent a full month after the property becomes available. I probably would have kept looking for tenants or tried to get the applicant to take the house sometime around July 10. A brief vacancy like that can allow time for maintenance, such as interior painting, that is difficult when the house is occupied.

Get rid of them one way or another. These people will be nothing but trouble. Mold is a recent fad, causing insurance people to freak out and the victim mentality to proliferate.

I had some bad tenants with a mold issue years ago. The house, built in the late '60s in Northern California, had no insulation in the exterior walls. (I suppose nobody cared about energy costs back then, or the builder was just too cheap.) The tenants had big, heavy furniture jammed against an exterior wall in the master bedroom. In the winter the walls were cold and there was so little air circulation that black mold accumulated behind the furniture. A lot of the moisture probably came from the shower in the adjoining bathroom.

I cleaned the mold off the walls with bleach water, repainted the lower portion of the wall and asked them to keep the furniture away from the wall. That was it. The tenants, basically hoarder types, didn't complain about mold again, and I don't think "getting sick" from mold was then in fashion. They were a pain in every other way, though, and it was a relief when they left.

I used to have some tenants who stopped by a credit union near their homes to pay rent. I gave them my account number. That doesn't seem convenient for some people, so it won't work for everybody. One hitch when I was doing this: Two houses rented for the same amount, and the tellers seldom put a memo on the deposits, so sometimes it was hard to tell who had paid. The solution is to make the rents at least $1 different.

The tenants definitely need to give you a notice of termination in writing, but you should not agree to simply cancel the lease. You should tell the tenants they are obligated to pay rent starting June 5 unless you find a new tenant who wants to start on that date or earlier. You also should mitigate your damages by trying to find a new tenant now. Don't return the deposit until you have a new lease signed. If the new tenant takes the property after June 5, charge the lease-breaking tenants the prorated rent for the days you have a vacancy because they backed out.

Also, if you find that you can't rent the property without reducing the rent below the amount they agreed to pay, charge them an amount to make up the difference for the term of the lease being broken. 

This make-up rent is unlikely in your situation, but I have charged it when tenants wanted to break a year lease halfway through the term, and I was forced to advertise the house in the late fall, a time that is not as popular as midsummer, when my tenants' lease started. My tenants were reasonable and seemed sincere about not wanting to cost me extra money. In return, I tried to make the early termination work with the security deposit I had already collected, and it did.

Read your lease provisions regarding early termination and replacement tenants. The TREC lease may be harsher than necessary and may envision you collecting more of a penalty than is realistic.

I think most of this depends on the kind of tenants you would have. You probably would be happy to inherit tenants, but you sure don't want to inherit bad ones. Screen them yourself if possible. If that's not possible, ask for whatever screening information the seller has. If you can get reliable records of rental payments, that would help when deciding whether to buy with tenants in place.

You probably won't know, though, how well they take care of the property or how often they have issues requiring your attention.

Well, those are all good questions, but I don't have to answer them at this point, because I have better prospects. In considering this, I did plan to apply part of the initial sum to a security deposit equal to one month's rent before allocating the rest to prepaid rent. And yes, I was thinking two much about getting through the first year's lease rather than the applicant's ability to stay longer.