Despite taking great care in selecting your tenants including running background checks and pulling a credit report, there can be scenarios where you will need to have a tenant evicted. Perhaps an otherwise good tenant lost his or her job and the rent stops, or maybe they cause a disturbance with the neighbors on an ongoing basis. These types of situations can often get messy and be unpleasant.
Do it legally.
Tenants have a lot of rights, often more than that of the landlord. If you don’t follow the rules you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit or saddled with vampire tenants who never pay rent but manage to play your mistakes so that they can stay as long as possible. These types of renters are called “professional tenants” and can be a huge drain on your income and your property. When you finally do manage to remove them, they leave nothing but unpaid rent and property damage in their wake.
It is hard to be mean.
Even if you follow all the proper procedures, and jump through all the hoops it is still unpleasant to ask someone to leave their home. If someone has fallen on hard times it is incredibly tough to be firm when asking for back rent, but you can’t allow someone to stay in your property without being paid for it either. If you end up with a so-called “professional tenant” you will either be met with bogus sob stories or anger and rudeness. None of this is particularly pleasant for either party.
Outsource it!
You don’t have to put yourself through these headaches. You could hire a property management company to deal with filling vacancies, screening potential tenants, handle evictions, and much more. Besides protecting yourself from problem tenants, a property management firm can offer you a whole host of other services.
- Repairs and maintenance of the unit.
- Handling emergency situations like broken pipes, or a furnace that goes out in the middle of the night.
- Showing vacant properties, and conducting rental interviews.
- Help with setting rent prices.
- Hunting down delinquent rent
- Resolving disputes between tenants
- Advertise vacancies
If you work with a property management company you don’t even need to live in the same area as your rental property. It can really relieve a lot of the stress that can go along with renting, especially if you would rather not deal with day to day problems and simply collect on your investment.