Investing in Garden City rental properties is the quickest way to build wealth. Even though this is your first experience as a landlord, you probably already know that rental property owners often need to deal with problems. Things like emergency repairs, property damage, and delayed rental payments just come with the territory. While good preparation and tenant screening can easily reduce some issues, other problems are still unavoidable. Knowing what the five most common issues that a new landlord faces can help you be prepared to handle them with ease.
1. Payment Issues
In certain cases, your tenants may pay their rent late or not at all. It is important to include late fees detailed in your lease documents, but it can be a hassle to charge and then collect on those fees. The loss of income from late or missing rent payments can also quickly turn your Garden City rental property into a serious cash drain. This is especially true because the eviction process, should it be essential, can take anywhere from one to three months. The perfect way to avoid such problems is to have a very detailed tenant screening process. It is advisable to perform a background check, credit check, and reference check on every applicant. An easy way to encourage timely rental payments is to establish an online payment method. Tenants enjoy the convenience of paying their rent and other bills online, and funds are often available to you faster as well.
2. Vacancies
As a Garden City property owner, your income relies on occupancy. If you found that your rental property is sitting empty for months at a time, that can quickly become a very expensive problem. You may also see yourself making poor decisions or renting to unqualified tenants in an effort to balance your cash flows. If finding tenants has become a challenge, it is suggested to double-check everything from your rental rate to your advertising. Your rental rate relies entirely on a detailed assessment of your local market. If your rate is too high, that may lead to longer vacancies. Also, you need to make sure that your advertising is reaching your target renter demographic. These days, it would be best to have your rental property advertised online and on social media, not to mention any other appropriate locations.
3. High Turnover
High turnover can be an equally expensive problem. Each time you need to find and screen a new tenant, you’re spending money instead of earning profits. If you’re starting as a new landlord and your tenants keep leaving, maybe you need to make a little investigating. While high turnover could be due to outside forces like the local market or economy, in other cases, your tenants might leave for reasons a little closer to home. If you haven’t already, make sure that your rental property is in good condition and that necessary repairs and maintenance are being done regularly. This is also a perfect opportunity to step up your communication with your tenants. Frequent positive interactions can make a big impact on tenant retention and help encourage your tenants to tell you the real reason they left. With that, you can address the problem directly.
4. Legal Compliance
As a landlord, you need to take care to operate your rental property in compliance with both federal and local laws. This can be a difficult challenge, sometimes. You may accidentally violate tenant-landlord laws without even realizing it. To avoid getting yourself into legal trouble, make sure that you have a thorough understanding of the federal Fair Housing Act and local regulations as well. Even one mistake could lead to an expensive, yet preventable, legal mess.
5. Property Maintenance
Keeping updated on property maintenance can be both time-consuming and hard to manage. This is because property maintenance requires both routine tasks and individual repair items. If you choose to carry out all of your property maintenance yourself, you must have a system in place or risk losing your tenant – or worse. If you’re just getting started, take some time to plan out a property maintenance schedule for the entire year. If possible, try to know more about how to carry out each property maintenance task as thoroughly but as efficiently as possible. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider hiring a property management company to fulfill your obligations. Due to their relationships with local service providers, a professional management company usually completes both routine maintenance and repairs for far less than you can. Either way, comprehensive property maintenance can help you avoid larger, more expensive repairs down the road.
Although these five problems are the most common ones, there are still many different problems that may occur that a new landlord may experience. Hiring a property management company like Real Property Management Boise can help you eliminate all of these issues as well as increase your return on investment. You can contact us online to learn more. However, if you do plan on managing your properties on your own, the most significant thing to remember is to use the best practices of the industry and to keep learning everything about how to succeed as a Garden City rental property investor. In this way, your landlord skills will continue to improve the longer you own your properties.
We are pledged to the letter and spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of equal housing opportunity throughout the Nation. See Equal Housing Opportunity Statement for more information.
