Key Takeaways
- Annual Property Maintenance is Essential – Regularly checking plumbing, gutters, smoke detectors, furnace filters, and other systems prevents costly damage, improves tenant safety, and extends the life of your property.
- Stay Proactive with Leases and Licenses – Renewing leases early and keeping rental licenses up-to-date ensures smooth operations, compliance with local laws, and consistent rental income.
- Professional Management Saves Time – Hiring a property management company like Sand Dollar Property Management helps landlords stay on top of routine tasks while reducing stress and improving tenant satisfaction.
Managing a rental property is hard work. As a landlord, you will be pulled in different directions by the diverse problems in your properties. If you are not dealing with maintenance requests, you may be screening tenants or chasing down rent payments.
Finding a way to stay organized in the midst of all these responsibilities can be challenging. As a result, for many landlords, important tasks are often overlooked. This can impact the quality of your services, tenant satisfaction, and your bottom line.
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To help you stay on top of the regular tasks that need to be done as well as problems that happen unexpectedly, it’s important to keep detailed checklists of all the important tasks that need to be done, when you need to do them, and the steps that need to be taken.
To help you get started on this, Sand Dollar Property Management has put together a list of some of the things you should be doing in your rental property that you may have overlooked.
Check Your Plumbing for Leaks
Plumbing leaks cause insidious damage to your rental. These leaks can happen in any part of the building where there are pipes running through walls, insulation, ceilings, and flooring, or in hidden places like underneath sinks, in the attic and basement.
A small hairline crack in one of your pipes can cause hundreds of dollars' worth of water damage in a very short time. The only way to be sure pipes are not leaking is to conduct seasonal tests and inspections of the plumbing. When checking for leaks, do not neglect to look for things like running toilets/showers or leaking faucets.
Clean and Fix Gutters and Downspouts
Blocked, loose or rusty gutters and misdirected downspouts are another potential source of water damage in your rental. Accumulated debris, bird nests and moss inside the gutters can redirect water into the internal structures of your roof or onto the walls of the building.
Along with a downspout that is not discharging in the right location, malfunctioning gutters can dump water around the base of a building, leading to basement flooding and eventually endangering your foundation.
Stay Up-to-Date on Local Rental Rates
One way to improve rental income without adding new amenities to your unit or updating its appearance is to make sure you are charging the right rent amount. Every year, before renewing the lease, check that the rent is still in line with what other landlords charge for similar rental properties in your area.
Keeping the rent too low will take money out of your pocket, but raising it too high will make your rental unattractive to tenants. Before raising the rent, try to understand the market forces driving the change and keep your rate within the reach of your target renters.
Test Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detectors
Smoke and carbon monoxide detectors save lives, protect your property, and help you avoid lawsuits. Most tenants don’t care about checking if the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in their rental units are working. As the owner of the property, this responsibility falls squarely on your shoulders.
Checking if smoke or carbon monoxide detectors and fire extinguishers in your building are working is a simple task. Sometimes all you have to do is replace batteries. However, if you don’t make this task a part of your yearly routine, you may forget to do it.
Replace Furnace Filters
Old and inefficient furnace filters impair the indoor air quality in your rental unit. By trapping dust, pollen, smoke particles and pathogens, they keep these harmful materials away from the tenants. This improves human health, while enhancing the function of HVAC systems and prolonging their service life.
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Old and ill-fitting furnace filters make your HVAC system work harder, increasing your energy bill and posing a fire hazard in your property. Furnace filter replacement is not something you want to leave to tenants, as it may never get done.
Renew Leases
Sometimes, weeks before their rent expires, tenants are indecisive about whether they want to renew it or move out. Sending them a reminder of the lease expiration 90 days before the date, as well as an offer to renew the lease, is a great strategy for getting existing tenants to remain in your rental.
Visit the tenant in person or send them a letter or email. Include the details of their current lease and the terms of the new lease in your communications with them, and always give your tenants an option to negotiate. Humans are creatures of habit; most tenants don’t like to move homes frequently. Use this to your advantage.
Renew Your Rental License
You can get so caught in the day-to-day responsibilities of managing your rental property that you forget the most important document on which the rental business rests: your rental license.
If your local laws require you to register your rental property or obtain a rental license, make sure the document is up-to-date. Failure to do this may cost you in unexpected ways.
Bottom Line
You could be asking if there is a way to put these tasks on autopilot, to avoid forgetting them. The steps in this list are part of the normal routine of a professional property manager. Hiring a property manager is one of the most strategically important decisions you can make as a landlord.
A professional property management company like Sand Dollar Property Management gives you the time to focus on what’s most important to you while they deal with the time-consuming work of handling the day-to-day rental operations. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
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