Tenants can help pay the bills -- or create more. (Photo: iStockphoto)
In my last post, I told you how we ended up “reluctant” -- and
long-distance -- landlords. For the past year, we hoped the people living in our Memphis-area house would buy it. But
they defaulted on their lease-purchase contract and left us with a major clean-up.
They also left us with our first lesson. Don’t expect that tenants will treat your house with any respect at all, especially if they don’t have a
deposit hanging in the balance.
I guess part of the problem is that we were always good renters.
We paid our rent on time, we cleaned a house thoroughly when we were moving
out, and we tried to stay on good terms with our landlords. So when we signed
that lease-purchase contract, I thought that if the “buyers” defaulted, we’d be
able to use that $7,500 deposit to cover the mortgage until we got the house sold or
rented again.
Unfortunately, when our renters moved out, we were left with a lot of
fixing to do. And while my husband and I spent one long weekend in the house
trying to make it presentable, our elbow grease wasn’t close to being enough. I
will spare you the more disgusting details, but suffice it to say the back
bedroom, which had been my dream office, now smelled like a toilet. It was so
bad we had to open the windows to even go back there. We pulled up the carpet
and the stains were soaked through the pad.
We had to get the entire bottom floor repainted. We hired a pest
control guy to come in and treat for the fleas -- he had to come back three
times. That’s really extreme when you consider nearly all of the ground floor
is hardwood or carpet.
We had to throw out all the curtains because of flea
infestation and because their dogs had shredded the window treatments, so we replaced
them with faux wood blinds. And then there was the cleaning. We had the house cleaned
several times, including a steamed carpet cleaning throughout once the bug guy
said the fleas were gone.
Then of course there was the yard maintenance while the house was
vacant, as well as the mortgage, which had just gone up because we’d lost our
homestead exemption since we no longer use the home as our primary residence.
Starting anew
All in all, we ran through that $7,500 pretty quickly. When we
were comfortable letting people see the house, we listed it for rent or sale,
with our Realtor managing both processes. We had showings, but there were four
other houses on our street for sale, in addition to new construction still
being completed in the neighborhood. Add that to the seriously depressed
Memphis market, and it made for a good dose of homeowner pessimism.
We had a lot of rental interest, but we also had several people
asking us to lower our rent by several hundred dollars. (We weren’t priced too
high for the house -- we just had lots of people who wanted in at a lower
price.) But we learned with the last people that if you lower your standards,
you’ll be bitten. And not just by fleas.
Finally, we got a true rental application. I was excited until I
saw the applicants’ credit scores -- they were abysmal. But they’d also written
a letter that was attached to the application. They explained they were both had gone through divorces in the past year that were now resolved, but had hit
their credit hard. They gave me references and asked me to call them before I
dismissed their application. The letter was heartfelt, well-written and
thorough. So I decided to give these renters a chance.
Next time, I’ll talk about my process checking references and
making a decision on who to rent our house to.—Alyson McNutt English