This is a critical topic to understand for anyone who wants to be a future landlord. The short answer to the question is “YES”. Although it is made out to be that owning properties is an easy way to make passive income, it is important to realize that this isn’t just a quick process. Being a landlord is accompanied with plenty responsibilities that can cost you not only money but also time. There are so many layers to owning real estate, with the utmost important one being management. Managing your properties is essential to be a successful landlord. This is such a tedious role that we have created a business to help take the responsibility off our clients and make it easier for them to enjoy their passive income while maintaining the title “landlord”.
Here are 4 reasons why being a landlord is a full time gig:
On-Call 24/7
As a landlord you are on-call 24/7. This means that you can be bombarded with questions, dilemmas, comments, and just about anything else by tenants at any time of day or night throughout your entire week. There isn’t a set 9-5 period where tenants can contact you because often times they have miscellaneous concerns and various problems that arise as they happen. Just because it is Sunday and you have plans to go to dinner with your family doesn’t mean that you won’t get a phone call or TEN from a tenant who thinks that the refrigerator is broken, or the oven light isn’t working.
Things go wrong
Moreover, as a landlord THINGS GO WRONG. I cannot stress this enough. It is not just all rainbows and ponies when you are dealing with real life people and real-life properties. In books it is often made to seem that you follow a 3-step process to reach the end goal, however in this case there is a lot of room for things to go wrong in the process. Sometimes the weather will damage the roof of a property causing water damage requiring an immediate repair of the shingles. Other times a water heater will break and flood a basement 3 inches before anyone even gets the chance to realize and at that point you have to replace the laundry machines that were in the basement and get the water drained out. At Tverdov Housing we have even had cases where squirrels were making noise in the walls, disturbing tenants. As a landlord, do you have a squirrel specialist who can take care of that problem? No? Then you have to stop your day and find someone to get out to the house immediately to get rid of the pests before they cause any damage in the walls of the property. As you can see, this isn’t a textbook process and each of these little tasks add up to hours of time consumed when you are dealing with them from various angles as you are the landlord of various properties.
Different tenants
You already know that not all people are the same. Therefore, it is the landlord’s job to deal with each type of tenant in a fair and appropriate manner. Some tenants are needier than others and need more time and reassurance from their landlord. Other tenants won’t contact you at all during their stay. Although this sounds ideal, you might come to find out upon lease expiration that the house was over-occupied and completely and utterly trashed during their tenancy. This leads me to our next point.
Maintenance
MAINTENANCE! This is absolutely essential in a landlord’s task book. Maintaining a property not only means keeping all records and data up to date, but this also means physically maintaining the property. We do this by performing thorough quarterly inspections on all of our properties and having close relations with our tenants to make sure that they are not experiencing any difficulties throughout the year. Our quarterly inspections help us ensure that the houses are still in proper condition and our tenants are still complying with the lease. Sometimes tenants won’t bring a problem to your attention, so it is important to stay on top of the game and reach out with an email every so often asking whether they have experienced any trouble recently. These could be big or small maintenance tasks, but it is definitely key to stay on top of it even if they are small ones here and there because those little problems could end up costing you a fortune if you don’t handle them properly at the start.
In conclusion, being a landlord is certainly a full-time gig if you plan on doing it the right way. Clearly owning 1 property and being on top of it is not going to be nearly as time consuming as owning 10+ properties. Therefore, it is up to you if you want to make being a landlord a full time gig. Ultimately, being a landlord is extremely rewarding and if it is something that you are passionate about and dedicate yourself to you can succeed greatly and grow your wealth immensely. Otherwise, just contact us and we will do all the heavy lifting for you while you collect mailbox money.
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