A very bad year with my rental property - Landlord Forum thread 358347

A very bad year with my rental property by sue on August 2, 2018 @12:42

This year, the rental property maintenance/tenant situations have been very difficult for me. Tenants caused all kinds of damages to my property. Hope you can learn from this and incorporate more clauses in the lease
1) Tenants turned down the temperature when the December weather was yo yo (high and low) last year, forgot to turn back up the thermostat and went on Christmas vacation. Long story short, one of the interior pipes froze and the whole downstairs ceiling came down with the frozen pipe burst solely due to tenant’s negligence. Had to pay my insurance deductible and a number of other things to get the house back in shape. Now my HO6 premium went up and thanks to centralized/online recording, my primary house insurance went up by $200/year b/c they detected this loss incident under my SSN/Home Insurance policy.
2) Now here is the situation that impacted the showing of the house and getting prospective tenants/students for next year's rent in a timely fashion. One of the former tenants left some kind of thick paint like stuff (not poop or blood) in the master bedroom toilet and went on vacation at the end of the semester. Looked disgusting. After I found out about it, I couldn't show the house to prospective tenants until the tenant came back and cleaned the bathroom. In the meantime, lost quite a few prospective tenants/students who were initially interested for the next rental year, but backed out after seeing the bathroom. I tried to convince them that I will get the house/bathroom cleaned with a professional cleaner, but no luck. As a matter of fact, one of the parents asked me if the room is occupied by a female student or not. Then she said never imagined a girl would live with this kind of bathroom condition.
3) The entire downstairs was painted as part of the frozen pipe incident. Now I see that the kitchen wall has a few large deep scars showing the drywall base during my inspection. Tenants must have banged some kind of furniture against the kitchen wall to take off part of the sheetrock. It’s simply misusing/ mistreating the property. There are also a number of violation notices I got from the Association for leaving the garbage can/recycling can outside. Left some junk stuff behind the house.
4) Tenants kept asking me if I could terminate my lease earlier since they moved out (I guess they had to sign up another lease with the other landlord before this lease is over). So, in addition to this kind of harassment/inconvenience of not having tenants lined up for next year, I ended up losing 1/3 rent for the last month before I got new tenants. These irresponsible tenants were nothing but trouble. I’m still inspecting the house and assessing the total losses.
Given all these, how do I handle the security deposit?

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Re: A very bad year with my rental property by lpadave on August 2, 2018 @13:57	[ Reply ]

giving you the benefit of the doubt, you assume these risks when you rent to students. they are not a protected class and irrespective of how many parents you get as guarantors, they are going to be tough on your property and require an iron hand and frequent inspections. with students you have no control of who's coming and going, whos living in your property. when yu have no control over whos living in your property,......youh ave no control over your property. many of our colleagues disagree and have successfully had student tenants coming and going for decades. your lease should require minimum heat be maintained. extreme low temperatures when occupancy by tenant is unknown or apparently absent can be considered an emergency entry condition,.....your lack of doing that is on you. your lease should also require tenant renters insurance which probably would have covered the no heat loss if indeed your heating system was working properly. rethink what youre doing and how your doing it.

Re: A very bad year with my rental property

Re: A very bad year with my rental property by sue on August 2, 2018 @18:09	[ Reply ]

Yes dave, Thanks. Got the message. Never ever had this bad experience with the students before. This is the most irresponsible group of tenants I have even seen. Although I didn't have the temp control in my lease, I have an umbrella clause saying any damage due to tenants negligence, will be repaired by tenants. Also have a clause do not do anything to raise my insurance etc. wanted to hear if any of the LLs had this kind of experience and how did they handle it.

Re: A very bad year with my rental property by June on August 4, 2018 @00:18	[ Reply ]

With students as tenants, just have parents as CO-SIGNERS on lease, do same background, credit, etc. If students do anything bad, parents have to pay up as "unpaid rent". Katie Kate is a genius on handling these types and has great success because she uses LPA Lease plus her own special clauses! All the best to you. Just do what Katie Kate does.

Re: A very bad year with my rental property