Property Management Blog

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. Is it a Good Idea?

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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Early Lease Termination Clauses

There are two different schools of thought regarding early lease termination clauses. Some landlords hold that they don’t want an early termination clause in their lease because it makes the tenant feel that that it is okay to terminate early. Others feel that it is better ...

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Utility Bills

Utility bills can be a real nightmare if the lease doesn’t cover them correctly. We frequently take over the management of a property that the owner had been paying the utilities for and then billing the tenant. Usually, the owner is having us take over because the tenant d...

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Tenant Supplied Credit Reports

If you’ve been a landlord for a while, you’ve probably encountered a tenant applicant who wanted to provide you with a copy of his credit report rather than you running a report yourself. The conversation usually goes like this:“I just had my credit report run t...

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