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
Posts
