Property Management Blog

My tenant died! What do I do?

There are many difficult circumstances to deal with as a landlord (which is why it’s important to have professional management of your property), but this is one of the most difficult. On the one hand, you have a sense of empathy for the surviving family, but on the other h...

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Leaving Belongings in a Rental Property

Sometimes a landlord is expecting that he’ll only be renting his property out for a year or two and doesn’t want to move all of his personal property out, or perhaps he just doesn’t have storage space elsewhere, and the basement on his rental property is a good ...

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Is it too late to collect what I’m owed?

Sometimes we take on a new client who had a bad experience with a previous tenant who left the property owing money for either rent or repairs, and wondering whether it’s still possible to go after that money.Generally, as long as too much time hasn’t passed, and you ...

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Daily Late Fees

Sometimes a client asks us about daily late fees, perhaps because they’ve charged them themselves when managing their property on their own, or perhaps because a previous property manager charged them. We do not recommend daily late fees for several important reasons:1. A l...

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Using Security Deposit for the Rent

Your tenant is either behind on their rent, or they're coming up on their last month of their lease, and they want to use their security deposit to cover it. There’s only one acceptable answer to this request: NO!Let’s look at each situation individually. The tena...

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Hiring the Cheapest Management Company

You’re probably looking for a management company, otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog. So what should you do? Should you just select the company with the cheapest monthly management fee? Probably not, for several reasons.First, you should take note t...

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Filing Eviction - How Soon?

Something that differentiates us from our competitors, and from most property management companies even outside of our markets, is how quickly we file evictions when a tenant hasn’t paid. When we take over accounts from other management companies, we frequently see that tho...

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Fair Housing - Children

Most people realize that discriminating based on things like race and gender are prohibited by law. However, we sometimes get requests from clients to not rent to people who have children. From their perspective, this is a reasonable request because they believe that children cau...

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Remaining Rent from a Skipped/Evicted Tenant

We occasionally get asked by our clients if a tenant is responsible for rent after they’ve been evicted or skip out mid-lease. The simple answer is “yes.” However, as with most things where the law is involved, the simple answer doesn’t really give you the...

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Pet Policy Change

We have recently changed our policy and the language in our leases related to pet fees. For many years we’ve only charged tenants a one-time non-refundable pet fee at move-in, usually in the amount of $250. While this is usually sufficient, there are always cases where a pe...

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