Tips For Maintaining Your Rental Property
Tips For Maintaining Rental Property
Once the qualified tenant moves in, you have to maintain the property for your tenant to help extend the life of the new lease in place.
Here are 5 pro tips to help accomplish this.
Tip #1
Perform a thorough move-in inspection that involves a lot of photos. This report documents the condition of the property before your tenant has moved in and assures you any claims you may make on your tenant upon move out. If a tenant comes back and wants their safety deposit when they have caused damages and you don’t have this report, you will lose every time.
Tip #2
Have an effective lease agreement that a professional has prepared for you. You want to cover any contingencies to make sure you and your tenant is protected. Am effective lease agreement also paves the path of what you need to maintain and what your tenant needs to maintain. This aids a lot of issues and maintenance costs in the future.
Tip #3
Perform a move-in orientation. This tip is very important for you and your tenant. Walk them thru and show them how to operate the systems of the house. Show them how to change the batteries in the thermostat, how to change the air filter and keep the drain lines clean. If your property has a pool, show them how to operate the pool pump if pool maintenance isn’t included in the effective lease agreement. This all minimizes maintenance costs due to ignorance.
Tip #4
Implement service contracts. Keeping your systems in tip top shape is important when you’re trying to lower maintenance costs and maximize cash flow. If your property has a AC system, we recommend putting a service contract in order to have an AC company come out twice a year to service the HVAC system to prolong its life as long as possible. The same goes for pool systems.
Tip #5
Perform regular inspections. Here at IGC we perform regular drive by inspections on every one of our properties in our inventory to ensure our tenants are in complacent with their lease like keeping the yard kept nice, theres no damage to the exterior, and to make sure theres no unauthorized pets roaming around. These instances would trigger an early interior inspection.
If everything looks good on the outside, we still do regular interior inspections at regular intervals that can be timed with the AC system inspection service plan every 6 months.
This gives you a chance to check up on the inside of your property and see how your tenant is taking care of it. Keeping it clean and maintaining the systems as they were instructed in the move-in orientation.
Following these tips will lower your maintenance costs, increase cashflow, and hopefully extend the life of your tenant’s lease.
You can watch the video that goes along with this blog entry here.
Do you need effective property management in Brevard County Florida? Book a free 5 minute consultation with an IGC representative today by calling us at 321.345.9630.