Monthly Archives: November 2013

The first two months are always the hardest.  I’m talking about when we take over a rental property for the first time.  Whether it’s already been managed by your or we have just finished rehabbing the house and now it’s ready to rent (well,especially if it’s being rented after rehab) we find that the first two months, from a property management standpoint are always the hardest. Why?

If we are taking over the property the tenants usually will want to tell us why.  Let’s face it.  If we are taking over a property it is probably because someone else hasn’t been doing a bang-up job.  So first we have to clean up the deferred maintenance issues that are no doubt present, smooth over the tenant and do all this without freaking out your check book too much.  

If we are renting a house that just got through with an extensive rehab then there are all sorts of things that may not have shown up in the rehab.  For instance, you can run drains and flush toilets for construction crews but until you have a house full of people using toilet paper and using the toilets often you cannot know if there is a problem somewhere deep down the drain line.  Or perhaps the furnace only works intermittently because of some weird deal.  We always find at least a few things like this.

The caution here?  Just make sure you have some repairs dollars still set aside for the first couple months of new tenancy.  After that it usually slows down to just an occasional trickle of problems.  But those first couple months I can almost guarantee you we will speak quite often.