As you can imagine, we get this question a lot, ‘I want to rent my home in Birmingham AL – What do I need to know?’
What’s up, everybody? Matthew Whitaker here doing another “Questions Owners Ask.”
Today’s question is “I want to rent my home in Birmingham AL, what do I need to know?”
First thing I would say is how important it is to find a good tenant.
At the end of the day, if I had to tell you one piece of advice, it is so imperative, find a good tenant.
So everything that goes with finding a good tenant like screening that tenant, making sure that tenant has fulfilled their obligations in the past, maybe even driving by some previous houses that the tenant’s lived in.
I mean, you need to do a good job, especially if you only have one house, of screening the tenant.
I would go over and above on this unless you’re like us and really used to screening tenants. We know what to look for. We even have certain algorithms that we work with, a company to help us find good tenants.
You may not be able to have access to these algorithms. You’re going to have to do some work on the front end to make sure that you’re getting a good tenant.
The second thing I would do is make sure that your move in inspection.
Because the last thing you want is for the tenant to destroy something or make a hole and you don’t have a good move in inspection report to go back to.
A judge is not going to look kindly on that if you have to go after them in court. If you don’t have kind of before pictures to take a look at it will not go well for you.
So do a good move in inspection. Hopefully, that won’t happen but it’s always important to have a good move in inspection.
The next thing I would say is, do a good job keeping up with your accounting.
You have, income, you have expenses, I mean, these are things that are going on your tax return. It’s so important that you keep up with every dollar you spend and every dollar that comes in.
This becomes a business when you start running houses. We’re able to keep up for that for our owners in our accounting software.
So at the end of the year, we’re able to give our owners report that basically breaks all this down. However, if you’re doing it on your own, you need to make sure that you’re keeping up with the accounting.
And the last thing is to keep good tenants in houses, you must get repairs done quickly.
The number one reason that tenants move out of houses is that the repairs aren’t being done really quickly.
And I just think it’s so important to keep good tenants in there and you don’t want them to move. I mean, the way to make money in this business is to keep good tenants in your house long term.
I’m Matthew Whitaker and this video answered the common question –Â I Want To Rent My Home In Birmingham AL – What Do I Need To Know?
I hope this was helpful.
Matthew is the CEO of Evernest. He is a student of the book Good to Great and is passionate about building the best property management company on the planet (and maybe even the universe if Elon Musk will hurry up). You can usually find Matthew at the baseball field with his son, at a dance recital with his daughter, or at his favorite restaurant with his wife, when he’s not in the office. And if you can’t find him in any of those places, it probably means he’s traveling.
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