How often do you get into and inspect your rental properties? Now I am not talking about a full-blown property inspection like the one that you did when you bought this rental. I am referring to one where you schedule some time to get into the house or apartment and see both how the tenants are taking care of the house and ensure there aren’t any repairs that need to be made.
When speaking with new customers, this is often a question we are asked. How often do you stop by. Our standard answer was that we try to stop by every 6 months or have our maintenance guys monitor the property when they are there for repairs.
Recently we formalized a process by which we get into every rental property that we manage at 30 and 90 days after move-in and then every 6 months after that. This give us a great chance to see how the property is being maintained as well as if there are any issues (such as water or roof leaks, exterior problems or any other issues) that need to be addressed for the good of the home.
We are also looking for extra occupants not on the lease, beds in places that are not bedrooms, smoking in the unit, any illegal activity, tenant caused damages, unauthorized pets and many other health & safety items. We take pictures and save those to our property management software online.
Those repairs are shared with our owners so they can feel good about how the tenant is caring for the home and that we are monitoring the situation. Having a consistent and standardized process makes it much easier to ensure we are getting it done on a regular basis.
If you self-manage your rental properties, ask yourself “when is the last time you were in each unit and looked specifically at overall condition”? If you have a property manager, is your property manager doing inspections and sending you pictures of your houses on a regular basis? If not, call us.
Leave a Reply