Whether you’ve been a landlord in the Carlsbad area for several years or you just bought your first rental property, you’re probably on the lookout for anything that you can do to make your life a little bit easier and bring in a little bit more money. You won’t find a magic bullet for all of your rental property woes, but what you can put together is a collection of tricks and tips that will help you run your business a little bit better every day. You’ll always be assembling your bag of tricks, but here are few to get you started down the right path.
Don’t Get Too Friendly
Like anywhere else in life, you’ll find that potential renters will run the gamut for you. You’ll discover tenants that you can’t stand as often as tenants that you’d jump at the chance to befriend. It’s important to remember that you’re running a business, not a social club. You’ll probably run into trouble with either extreme, so you’ll need to do your best to treat your tenants like clients as business partners.
Don’t let interactions get too personal, keep things professional, and stay as impartial as possible. Impartiality will help you hold tenants accountable for their part of the lease and avoid emotionally charged encounters or business decisions. To keep the money flowing and your tenants happy, keep them in the right place in your social world.
Don’t Use a Pre-Made Lease
It can be tempting to fall back on one of the many pre-written leases you can find online. You may think that it’s a simple process to change whatever language you’d like and go forth seeking signatures. While it may save time and money (writing a lease from scratch can be time-consuming), this is a bad idea for many reasons.
Landlord-tenant law in Carlsbad is going to differ from New York, Chicago, or Des Moines. Your lease is a legal document and will be the basis of any legal action you may need to take against a tenant (or that a tenant can take against you).
For this reason, it’s important that your lease reflects current Carlsbad law as it impacts rental properties and landlord-tenant relationships. Hiring a Carlsbad property management company to take care of this detail can be one way to solve this issue. If you aren’t ready to make that leap yet, you should hire a lawyer to write your lease. You can be confident that it will hold up in court and do what it needs to do.
Set the Right Rents
Regardless of how involved you are with your properties, you are ultimately running a business. Setting the right price for the service you are offering is as important with your business as with any other. Be sure that you are pricing your rental rates correctly. If you set them too low, you may have an easy time finding tenants, but you’ll be losing out on revenue. If you set them too high, you may be making a lot of money from the renters that you do attract, but you’ll have a harder time filling your properties as renters look to comparable but cheaper options. This "just right" number is what’s known as a “Goldilocks Price.” Getting this correct can take some work (and market research) but it’s critical to running your business well.
Screen Your Tenants Well
Your tenants are an essential pillar of your business. Without them, you wouldn’t have much of a business at all — it would be you and a few empty buildings (and bank accounts). Because you're so reliant on your tenants to make your business a success, it’s essential to pick the right people. Avoid the notion that you can “trust your gut” and establish a fair and thorough screening process that checks on rental history, income, and other items that you’ll want to use to make a judgment call on whether that tenant will be a good fit for your properties. Remember, there is no perfect process, and any method that you do establish will need to hold up to fair housing laws. Doing an excellent job up front will save you a lot of stress down the road.
A Carlsbad Property Manager Can Help
Being a landlord can be a full-time job, and you may feel you’re winging it some days. If you’re struggling to make it work and find the financial success that you hoped to see, a Carlsbad property management company can help you. They can bring the legal knowledge and management skills that you’ll need to handle all of these concerns. They can screen tenants, help you set the right rental rates, keep your paperwork in order, and help your business to thrive.
How can you put these skills to work for you? Download our free guide to selecting the best Carlsbad property management company to find out. Enter your name and an email address, and you’ll find a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Reach out for a free consultation and let us know how we can help you!
