Landlords, Avoid Cash Flow Disruptions

A tenant has left and your rental unit has gone dark. Or, worse, you were forced to evict several tenants. Losing tenants is a landlord’s worst nightmare, but at a certain point, you must accept responsibility. For the time being, this means that you are losing a major source of income. You must also consider the costs of getting a new tenant– making the unit “rent ready”, advertising and broker fees, and your time. These costs are significant. Suddenly, what looked like a good year, financially, is now mediocre or worse. Carefully selecting your tenants, and subsequently offering them outstanding service is the ideal way to prevent a loss, and drive profit.

Offer Tenants World-Class Service

If you want to prevent setbacks such as this, make your place irresistible and irreplaceable to tenants. That means maintaining the building, rather than being a slumlord– especially commercial properties.

Also, make sure you go out of your way to treat your tenants like the gold that they are. How does being nice and taking care of your place help? It makes a tenant think twice about leaving. Most tenants would rather avoid the uncertainty of going someplace new for the familiar pleasant environment you’ve created. It won’t work forever, but if it gets you an additional few months or a few years of uninterrupted cash flow, it’s worth it. This is something you can do, right now, and it can be a win-win for you and your tenant.

Think of an improvement you can make to one of your properties – something that will enhance it’s value to you, and something that your tenant will appreciate. Then make it happen. If you play your cards correctly, you may avoid this downside of being a landlord altogether.

Scrutinize Tenants During the Selection Process

For the sake of both your property and financials, you need to carefully evaluate tenants before signing a lease.

Many landlords are so eager to get a paying tenant in place that they will take the first person that has the ability to sign a lease and write a check for the rent. Yes, this will stop the “bleeding”, but what happens next? Will this new tenant leave shortly thereafter, leaving you with the same problems you were trying to avoid? Can they afford the rent payments in the long-term? Will their children throw a huge party in your house the moment the parents go away?

Selection means biding your time, and carefully sizing up your tenant, both financially, personally and from a “gut” level. Find tenants that will work for your own needs, whatever they may be. We do this all the time for our clients because we’ve seen just about every which way these things can go bad. Through a solid tenant screening process, we “spot the issues” in a potential tenant before they become a problem.

Hire a Long Island Real Estate Attorney

Avoiding cash flow disruptions is just one part of our Rental Business Strategy Review  we do with our landlord clients. Want to hear more about other strategies our clients are using to keep their cash flow flowing?  Give us a call, and we’d be happy to evaluate your rental business strategy to see if there are ways to improve upon it and help you come up with a plan to make it happen.  You can reach us at 631.669.6300 and ask to be put on my calendar for a brief ten minute introductory call to see if this structure might be right for you, or feel free to shoot me an email at jclark@clarkslaws.com.