Real Estate Blog

I had a busy day today - 5 houses I had to go check on in a certain part of town and 1 to do a move-out walk-through.  A section 8 home I own happened to be my walk-through and boy was I sad to lose this tenant.  Not only did I not have to worry about the rent always coming in, but believe it or not, she was one of the best tenants I have.  Not everyone that is section 8 is bad, and in fact, I have as many bad high rent paying tenants as I do low rent ones!

The carpets were not in the greatest shape, but I could not fault them because it was about time for a new carpeting anyways.  Then come the walls and fixtures, this is what I usually see the most problems with, aside from the carpets of course.  When I get to the home, the tenants are still busily running around getting the house ready - I knew it wasn’t quite done because of the moving truck still sitting in front of the house.  What to do, I thought.  Well, sometimes you just have to take the lemon and make lemonade, so I did just that.  I offered to give them the rest of this weekend to get the house ready, and they were very happy. 

The reason I wanted to mention this story is because by me going into what appeared to be a bad situation, I was able to turn it around and make both parties happy.  I will be getting a home back that is in rent ready condition on Sunday and I gave my current tenants a opportunity to take their time on getting the house cleaned up.  Both of us were happy.

I typically do not do my own walk-through, but I am actually glad that I did on this one.  Sometimes and often so, we become hardened by the day to day operations of landlording, but once in a while we need to step back and put ourselves in the shoes of our tenants - we may learn something valuable about ourselves.

Happy Landlording!