@Michelle Felux
I don't think collecting on this $75 is worth the headaches down the line it could possibly cost. The issue of furnace filters in SFR is always a thorny one. This is a difficult lesson that if you're self-managing and doing much of your own maintenance, you can expect that the burden of replacing filters is always going to ultimately fall on you. It is also, as had been indicated, a good excuse for routine inspection of your property
But there's a lot of other stuff around this problem, there's mess that needs to be addressed. You're at three properties right now and self-managing. Self-managing has its pluses and its minuses for both you and for your tenants. The main plus it has for your tenant is that the lines of communication with the landlord are open and accessible.
But here's trouble, and three months into the lease now, your new tenant gets a lesson about how you handle trouble -- you send an impersonal, officious letter highlighting section 19B and 21A of the lease to demand payment. It's as much a caricature as a fat, floridly mustachioed police officer pounding down a doughnut in a Crown Victoria.
Does the tenant have your telephone number? Do you have hers? If so, then clearly the reason for the letter is to avoid a frank and open discussion. So where does the landlord-tenant relationship go after this letter? As a self-managing landlord myself, I've avoided sending such letters except when I have to, and I always make the phone call first and the letter is a legal formality that comes later.
Now, will I do business differently if I get to fifty doors and in-house property management? Of course. But the nature of my business will also have significantly changed. My tenant will know that she's one of fifty, not one of three. By ten doors I plan on routinely pretending to any new tenants that I'm a paid employee, a property manager just making ends meet myself, and not the actual landlord. I'm certain I'll still make the call, of course, if I'm not paying an actual property manager already by 10 doors because I'll be sick and tired of this garbage.
This business with home warranties, as indicated previously, is a total waste of money. These guys operate just like new car service people -- any maintenance cost that can be avoided for the promised years of zero-cost maintenance is avoided and then the car's a lemon that needs big bucks in neglected maintenance as one after another system fails, exactly as it was designed to. Granted, the hustle can't be as perfect with houses as it is cars, because the design of the house is not dictated by the home warranty people, as the design of the car is dictated by the same people who sell you manufacturer's service, but that's how it works. You cannot trust home warranty representatives and their dubious credentials any further than you can throw them. You need a local HVAC guy you can lean on, one who is preferably a fellow property investor and understands your business.
You need to learn the basics of every cooling system of every home you self-manage, and that entails a basic familiarity with furnace fundamentals. How big is the home? Is the system sized properly for the home? What kind of filters should you use and exactly how often and why should you change them out? If you haven't had these sorts of confabs with your HVAC guy, you're shooting yourself in the foot. For instance, if you had made the call about fixing the house to your HVAC guy, and he had gone over there, you would know exactly what's what instead of what you have now, a big bundle of question marks from a source of dubious veracity.
What your tenant will very likely do once she gets the letter is post it on FB and complain about what a pain in the neck her new landlady is. There will be five friends on her friends list who desperately want to be liked who will confirm for her that yes, you are a terrible person. There will probably be a couple that bring up the point that that changing filters every month or the A/C coils freeze doesn't sound quite right, just as is being done here.
Having a regular HVAC guy inspect the setup from the start would have kept this a nonissue. You would have an understanding with him.
The other thing with the light cover and the cleaning company is another dead giveaway that you're trying to run with the hands-off approach before you can walk. Back door locking bar is also something you should have looked at more closely.
Do you have a go-to handyman yet? These random maintenance costs are going to keep eating you alive as a landlord. I am the go-to handyman of our little outfit. It's 5:30 in the am as I write this on the East Coast. I'm off with my wife to a duplex that I'm renovating in a few minutes. After 6 pm, I have to go to a tenant's house to do an installation of a gas dryer that the HD delivery people who were supposed to have installed refused to take down to the basement because there wasn't enough space to maneuver it down the stairs (and they were in a hurry). If we had to rely on third parties for this sort of thing we'd already be bankrupt doing this business -- the costs would just pile up and up. Now granted, I'm sure my situation and my properties are significantly different from yours, but the same maintenance principle that holds up in medicine holds up in landlording, just like you, your house needs a poorly paid primary care physician first to direct the flow of expensive specialists afterwards, and the better the primary care physician the more money you'll save in care costs.
I apologize for the rambling but I'm in a hurry. Good luck, Michelle. I sympathize more than I could possibly express.
