All Forum Posts by: Mike F.

I'd see this the other way around and another reason why self-managing a manageable amount of units is preferred.  I'd personally be questioning the choice of my property manager if a situation like this occurred. His screening process renting to somebody like this is questionable. His 'surprise' of finding this damage is questionable again.

A good tenant takes should be classified as one that is doing everything right not most things right, my advise is if you're new to this to start setting your bar a bit higher which will make your life infinity easier over the long run. 

Start enforcing the late fees immediately, get serious with her and serious about your business. There is a really good chance that you'll discover whatever preconceived notions you have about her and her personal / financial situation will probably be changed, when she suddenly changes too and starts paying her rent on time because her landlord is charging her late fees now.

WOW

It blows me away when somebody says they have a 5 day grace period, 9 days? Why not just have a 30 day grace period? I just don't understand the concept of telling tenants the rent is due on the 1st... well (wink wink) it's actually not due till the 5th. If you just want to always pay it on the 5th every month that's cool, or actually you can just pay your rent on the 9th and sometimes because of a weekend or a holiday it won't be really due until the 11th.

So he should be able to charge some 'fair' pricing that works out to maybe $9.00 an hour and make a bunch of cheap landlords happy. LOL

 It's based in my reality,  combined with systems that qualify good tenants and methods that make sure we rent to only good tenants and pass the rest of them on to our competition to make their lives a living hell and question why they are in the rental business, everything is in place to make our rental business a breeze with minimal amounts of time invested. Majority of our tenants are in their units 5 years and longer we can have no contact with many of them for 12-18 months at a time. How would you like to experience that? The phone never rings, no texts, no nothing, just steady rental checks being automatically collected through Cozy and being deposited into your bank account month after month.

And nobody is stuck with a bad tenant,  there is no such thing as a bad tenant that a landlord has no contact with, bad tenants create incidents that create contact, so each contact with a bad tenant is an opportunity for you to move them toward eviction if you want to.

The 2nd rule in plumbing is "don't get any on you"

Just because they sent a guy with 2 days experience or 20 years experience has no bearing. If you hired a plumbing company you hire a company that holds a master plumber license. 

As a landlord with no knowledge of toilets and plumbing systems you really should make the effort to learn about these things, meeting the plumber at your property and learning first hand from him would have been invaluable for you. If you're going to sit back and use your mouse to solve problems and seek advice you're not really helping yourself. Had you met with the plumber you might have learned first hand from him about how toilet system works and that questioning if the tenant was responsible is really an absurd accusation. To then follow on with this complaining about the rate charged really shows you're focused on the wrong things here.

So does your tenant, she have no problem paying a reasonable rental rate, who gets to decide what's reasonable? Whenever people throw the words 'fair' rates, 'reasonable' rates you can just substitute the word cheaper and it means the same thing. There is no such thing as fair or reasonable there is only market rates. As a consumer you get to decide the value of the service versus the rate charged for it before you purchase it, you don't get to decide whether it's reasonable or not after you agree to pay it.

^^^ yep.

As a friend of mine who's a master plumber explained to me he gets those types of customers all the time who complain about him being great at what he does. 

He tells them it's $200 for me to do this. I can do it in 15 minutes and it's $200. Or I can do it in 15 minutes then go sit in my truck for 45 minutes and it's still going to be $200, or you can hire somebody else who isn't as experienced, they can take 2 hours to do it and charge you $200.00.

In other words the job is going to cost you $200. You're paying me $50.00 for the time it will take me to do  the work and it's $150.00 for the 25 years it took me to get to the point I can make it look this easy.

The same school your tenant wants to know where they said you can charge $X for renting your unit to her.