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Advice on renting out a property
Obviously, now is not a good time to be selling our house that we bought in 2008, but H and I may need to move for a few years. We may or may not come back to our house at the end of this time, but if we move back to the area, we like our current house and location. If we don't move back, hopefully the market would be better for selling.
Does anyone have any experience w/ renting out a property? How did it go? Was the place completely trashed afterwards? We'd be using a property manager, how much do those cost? Recommendations for property managers? In Baltimore City if that helps.
The other option is just to take a massive hit, and hope that what we'd get for our house would cover the cost of another house in a market where houses cost less.
Re: Advice on renting out a property
DH and I own a rental property in Canton. DH inherited it from his grandfather who passed away and the property was paid off before it ever came to us, so we owe nothing. Anything that we charge for rent comes right to us.
We are not "handy" people and attempted to do this without a rental company at first. We had a wonderful renter that was a friend of a friend and she would fix everything and then call us later. However, if something big went up (window air unit, hot water heater) we were then responsible for the fix and the cost.
After she moved, we had a hard time finding someone, so we went with a management company to make things easier. They take a percentage of the rent every month and they find renters for us. We got lucky with our last two renters who have paid every month and not trashed the place, however my IL's and BIL who also own properties there have not been so lucky, even with the management co. The company can only do so much to make sure these people pay and not trash the place. And honestly, it's not like you can just say "you're not paying, get out". The laws are much more in favor of the renter, not the rentee. (don't really know if that is a word!) BIL has had people in his property for months not paying rent. And of course they don't care if they trash the place at that point.
Also, another thing to remember about the city is taxes. We pay almost three to four months rent in taxes every year. It is terrible. So then we have to hope that nothing huge goes wrong throughout the year and that the renter pays.
I guess my point is, in my experience it has been a slight PIA (even though we really don't have to do much). We went into this thinking we would have all this "extra" money since the property was paid off and we could bank the rent. But we have learned to not rely on that at all and we kind of forget about it until the taxes are due. I guess it would be a different situation for us if we had a mortgage that needed to get paid every month. I guess you need to ask yourself whether you could foot the bill if the property went unrented for a month or months?? Even using a rental company doesn't guarantee that. Best of luck to you! Sorry so long!
We rent out a SFH in Harford county that DH inherited. It is a PITA to be a landlord. We've had awful people trash the house and skip out on thousands of dollars in rent--you can send them to collections but if the agency can't find them or gets in a battle with them, you'll never see the money. We've had nice renters fall on hard times and DH was too nice to force them pay rent for a few months and eventually had to evict them.
We've had massive renovations that had to be done--things that maybe he and I could have worked around if we had lived there but were in violation of the law if we didn't fix them for renters. We have had to put a lot of money into fixing the house and repairing after trashy tenants move out.
The saving grace with this last round of tenants has been working with a management company. Our manager takes all of the first month's rent plus about 10% of each subsequent month's rent but she did all the advertising, all the showing, all the credit checks and paperwork, got us $200 more per month than we were asking by ourselves, handles all the communication (seems small but this way the renters don't have our email, phone number or address which is good security), does a walk-through every 6 months to a year, and would handle all the legal issues, should they arise. Our current tenants got a little behind in rent and our manager took them to court. The tenants didn't show at court but there was a rent check in her office when she got back.
I would never, ever rent out a house without a management company again. The only time we side-eyed her a little was with these current tenants who wanted a lot of cosmetic repairs before they paid back-rent (that is not legal). They had been somewhat reasonable otherwise so we wanted to meet them halfway--get the rent but we'd make a few repairs. The manager wanted to terminate their contract and get new people. She pushed it, in fact, and we think it's because she would get entire first month's rent from any new tenants plus credit check fees, etc from all applicants.
Read up on the laws--tenants have A LOT of rights and can demand quite a bit from you. Also, use the first few months of rent to build a fund of at least $10k just for the rental house. If something like a bad roof or a leaky basement crops up, you'll have to fix it promptly and with a dedicated fund you'll be able to fix it without dipping into your own personal savings.
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Who do you use? A realator or a company that does property management? I have the same questions, where do you start?
I got the info for my property management company from my realtor. My condo is in Arnold, so I'm not sure they manage properties outside of AA county, but we use Innovative Properties.
I just emailed the contact my realtor sent me inquiring about renting out my property and went from there. The guy came out looked at our place, told us what we needed to do to get it in rental condition and what he thought we'd be able to rent it easily for. He put it on the market mid way through us fixing it up and within a month and a half we had a renter.