First-time Landlord Guide: How To Avoid Renting Horror Stories

Property investors are in it for profit but they surely face many challenges and difficulties along the way. Being a landlord is a hard task that comes with a lot of problems regarding dealing with tenants, payments, broken rules, and lack of maintenance by the tenants. It can feel like you are in a nightmare if you do not have your own approach to deal with these problems and the task itself as a whole. If you are new to the field, you may need some guidance to help you avoid all these rental problems and awful stories that might happen. Here are some tips that will help you.

1. Background Checks 

It is important to choose suitable tenants to rent your property. In the end, you run into more problems and trouble by renting your property to bad tenants. There are some background checks that you can do during the screening process that will help you avoid these problems. This may not be very effective in all your rentals as some people may be hard to deal with even if they passed all your initial checks. There are many things you have to check, including their credit history, incidents with previous landlords, and their criminal background if there are any. This will allow you to choose the right tenants and manage late payments or no payments if that ever happened with a tenant. 

2. Hire a Property Manager 

A property manager is someone who is gonna take care of all the details of renting out your property. Starting from choosing the right tenants to taking care of any damage done to the property, they take care of it all. A property manager handles late payments, markets your property, and even saves your time by taking care of all the tenants’ issues and solving them on your behalf. They can easily take care of more than one property of yours if you are overwhelmed with all their responsibilities. You need to search for the property management companies in your region, it is quite easy to find assistance regarding property management in Las Vegas as there are many professional teams that you could hire. Try to reach out to their other clients in order to understand their policy and how they get their work done. 

3. Get Insurance 

Even if great care is taken, there might be some damage done to your property that you can not avoid so you need to be protected to reduce the costs. The solution to this problem is landlord insurance which is a form of home insurance coverage that protects landlords from financial losses incurred as a result of renting out their property. This will cover any damage done by a fire, storm, theft, or damages done by the tenants themselves. This insurance policy will cover the cost of the entire property in case any incident happened that resulted in a total loss. In addition, in the event that your rental property becomes uninhabitable, insurance will assist you in recovering your lost income.

4. Have a Rental Agreement 

Having a written rental agreement is the best way to protect yourself as the owner of a property. A professional landlord will never rent out his or her property without first obtaining a written agreement. The main benefit of putting rental terms in writing is that it protects the landlord’s ability to hold a tenant liable for rent money for the whole duration or term of the lease, even if the tenant moves out long before the contract expires. Moreover, the rental agreement should include all the rules you want your tenants to follow. All the rules should be specifically written, for example, if there will be a fee on late rent payment, if pets are not allowed, or if there is any noise restriction rule. 

Rental agreements’ rules and points should be clear for both sides from the start, this is the way you and your tenant should communicate. Last but not least, you must consult a legal professional when writing your rental agreement, and add to it to make sure that all rules are legal for you to put in the agreement. 

Being the owner of an investment property and putting it up for rent can be a risky but rewarding venture. You must expect to deal with problems even once or twice as you will sooner or later have to no matter how careful you are and strict with the rules. However, setting these rules and having guidance will help you reduce problems and avoid bumping into bad tenants.