There are 19.95 million rental properties in the United States, according to Census data and 70% of those are owned by individual investors. Are you one of these individual investors or landlords?
Even though owning an investment property can be a lucrative endeavor, it can also be a time-consuming one, if not set up right. Read our tips on how you can become a more hands-free landlord and use your free time for hobbies or spending time with loved ones.
Automate Rent Collection
You need to try and automate as many of these repetitive and menial tasks of a landlord as possible. Instead of going around every month and collecting rent in person, or sending messages to tenants who are delayed, make it so the process is more streamlined.
Perhaps you can use post-dated cheques if that’s allowed in your state, or you could use tenant management software so the tenant can log into the program and pay their bills directly.
Have automated email reminders set up as well, in case the tenant is late with their payments. And use this to remind them a week or so before the due date.
Hire Property Management Services
This is a big one when trying to become a hands-free landlord. You can’t do it all and neither do you want to.
By hiring a full-service property management service, you can give up some of these monthly tasks over to a property manager. This way you can spend your free time either accumulating more investment properties or doing whatever else your heart desires.
Choose Quality Tenants
Landlords spend a lot of their time chasing bad tenants, kicking them out, and/or dealing with the mess they left behind. So if you can avoid this problem from the get-go, that would be quite helpful.
You can do this by doing extensive credit checks on all potential tenants and calling all references to ensure they have a good record with past landlords.
Perform Regular Maintenance on Your Properties
If your properties are maintained on time and kept up to standard, then you won’t have to get up in the middle of the night often to fix broken toilets or other such issues. Try to be a proactive landlord rather than a reactive one as that should save you a lot of time and make it a lot more hands-free.
Having a team of contractors on your roster will help in this regard as well. At least you won’t have to go searching for someone every time something happens to your property if you have a team already in place.
Treat Each Investment Property With Care
As a landlord, you are well aware that each investment property is like a little money-making machine putting cash into your pockets monthly. So you want to treat each of them with as much diligent care as possible.
If you can’t do it on your own, hire a property manager to do this on your behalf. Contact us to learn more about our full-service community/HOA management services in Vancouver, Washington.
