Thursday, January 22, 2015

Renting My Home Out? What To Do, What Stays, What Goes, & the Lawn

 



As a property management company in Charlotte, we’ve fielded many different questions from homeowners who are contemplating renting their homes out to the public for the first time.  Below are a few popular questions from them in our proverbial mailbag:

 

1.  What should I do to get my house ready for the rental market?

 

Make it look good. 

 

Okay, that was the succinct answer for our busy clients; but it’s accurate.  I visited a property recently that had sat on the rental market for months.  When approaching the property, the lawn was not mowed, half the front shrubs were trimmed (and half were not), and a window was broken.  Really, the sale was lost before any prospective tenants even set foot into the home. 

 

So, make the house look good.  But don’t go for broke doing it.  Touch-up paint, normal yard maintenance, carpet steam cleaning, and a professional cleaning should be almost all that is needed in most cases. 

 

 

2.  I’m moving out of my house and want to leave some things behind.  Do I need to worry about the incoming tenant messing with my stuff?

 

Yes.

 

And I don’t mean to make tenants out to be bad people here.  Chances are, 99.99% of tenants don’t care what is in the boxes in your attic and will never check.  But Murphy’s Law dictates that the owners who decide to leave their original Picasso in the garage storage closet will find it missing when their tenants move out.  Or the tenant’s kid’s name scrawled in crayon all over the canvas.

 

So, the rule of thumb is, if you care about something, don’t leave it in the house.  Somehow, someway, it will be taken or defiled and you’ll kick yourself.  If you don’t really care about the stuff, you can leave things (within reason) in the attic or another inconspicuous storage area.  After all, it’s still your house.

 

 

3.  I LOVE my lawn.  I work on it all the time and my neighbors fawn over how GREAT my landscaping is.  The Charlotte Observer takes pictures of my house because their gardening reporter says my lawn “gives him hope in a dark world.”  But, alas, I need to move out of town.  If I leave detailed instructions, will the tenant take care of the lawn like I ask?

 

No.

 

And, please, sell the house instead so you (and the gardening reporter) are not rudely confronted with what a disinterested tenant will allow your meticulously manicured lawn to morph into.

 

However, if selling is not in the cards, then the advice to keep your sanity:

 

a.  Set very low expectations for your lawn’s upkeep (aka the lawn will be mowed approximately every 2 weeks- that’s it.  And the gentle, mineral water feedings are over; pray for rain.)  Unfortunately, there’s really not much a property management company can legally do if the lawn is kept at city code and doesn’t violate any HOA covenants.  As a landscaping aficionado like you knows, we’re talking bare bones upkeep.

 

OR

 

b.  Start a landscape contract for a gardener to visit your home every 10 days and keep it to your specifications.  You can try to include this (lawn care included!) as a selling feature in the rental ad (and increase the rent accordingly); however, it is typically tough to sell the value of included lawn care because few people read the rental ad copy in its entirety and then go a step farther to do the actual math to see if it’s a good financial deal versus other slightly less expensive rentals.  You’ll probably take a small financial loss versus not offering lawn care, but will gain valuable piece of mind that your lawn is not suffering a slow, gruesome death.

 

And that’s all from the mailbag this time.  Good luck!

 

Brett Furniss is the President & Owner of BDF Realty (Charlotte Residential Property Management), the trusted real estate advisor for Charlotte landlords & Home of $100 Flat Fee Property Management.   BDF Realty utilizes their innovative Pod System for exceptional customer service in residential property management, home repairs, and home sales for single-family homes, condos, and town homes in the Charlotte-Metro Area.  Contact Us Today!

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