Leasing out your S&B home?
Hello friends! We want to go full time but don't want to give up the S&B yet. It's a nice older home (70's) on a lake just North of Milwaukee. We believe we should be able to get top dollar for a l...
Forum Discussion
We have leased out our home on our own (no property manager) for nearly 7 years and it has been fine. Prior to that we leased out other houses for 14 years, no property manager, no problem.
We put a sign in the yard and sit inside and wait for people to come in. Amazingly, they do. We evaluate them as people, get a contract from Staples and go through it with them. We shake hands and hope for the best.
We have them pay by direct deposit into our checking account with stiff daily penalties if they are late. Usually the first month is rocky as they sort out how to do this, but all of our tenants have figured it out. No one has been late and no one has skipped out on us.
We've had 4 tenants since we left home 7 years ago and all have been good. We have returned to our house twice to work on it between tenants. In each case, one week of work (painting, cleaning, small repairs) has made the place better than when we lived there ourselves.
We have a home warranty contract with American Home Shield and give the tenants the contract number. Depending on the repair, either they pay the service fee or we have them deduct it from the rent.
We do have a friend in the area who can stop by in a crisis (one set of tenants was physically disabled, so our friend went over to the house twice for them. We paid our friend, of course. We also had this friend put a sign in the yard once when we had a tenant rollover when we were on the opposite side of the country and didn't want to drive back. We paid him one month's rent for getting our new tenants.
It has worked out really well for us.
We put a sign in the yard and sit inside and wait for people to come in. Amazingly, they do. We evaluate them as people, get a contract from Staples and go through it with them. We shake hands and hope for the best.
We have them pay by direct deposit into our checking account with stiff daily penalties if they are late. Usually the first month is rocky as they sort out how to do this, but all of our tenants have figured it out. No one has been late and no one has skipped out on us.
We've had 4 tenants since we left home 7 years ago and all have been good. We have returned to our house twice to work on it between tenants. In each case, one week of work (painting, cleaning, small repairs) has made the place better than when we lived there ourselves.
We have a home warranty contract with American Home Shield and give the tenants the contract number. Depending on the repair, either they pay the service fee or we have them deduct it from the rent.
We do have a friend in the area who can stop by in a crisis (one set of tenants was physically disabled, so our friend went over to the house twice for them. We paid our friend, of course. We also had this friend put a sign in the yard once when we had a tenant rollover when we were on the opposite side of the country and didn't want to drive back. We paid him one month's rent for getting our new tenants.
It has worked out really well for us.
