How to keep your tenants happy

Here are some tips for small-time landlords who are worried about losing tenants at a time when options for renters are greater than ever. From Multifamily Executive Magazine, these renewal tactics are aimed at professional property managers, but they work for amateurs just as well:

* Start early. Don't wait for the final month -- or worse, until your tenants contact you. Several months out, contact the tenants to try to determine their intentions. If need be, offer to keep the rent at the same level. And if necessary, offer a holdover discount -- or better yet, a discount if they re-up for more than 12 months.

* Improvements. Offer to repaint or replace the worn-out refrigerator or carpet. You would probably make these fixes anyway after the current tenants leave, so make those repairs now and keep them. More money is lost when a house or apartment is left vacant than is spent by sprucing it up. And besides, the cost is deductible.

"It's amazing how happy you can make a resident by putting a new refrigerator into a unit," Mark Fogelman of the Fogelman Management Group in Memphis, Tenn., told the magazine.

Another major landlord visits with tenants a couple of weeks before starting the renewal process, using the meeting to perform non-requested upgrades to lighting and bathroom fixtures.

* Be handy. Make yourself accessible. If tenants get locked out, don't make them call a locksmith. Run over yourself with your key.

If your tenants need help with cleaning, for example, maybe you can lend them your cleaning company for an hour or two. It's hard for renters to give up a conscientious landlord and take their chances on an unknown commodity.

* Be secure. If the tenants have been there for a year or more and have always paid on time, there's probably no reason to keep their security deposit. Give it back, all at once or in installments. Any new place will want a security deposit, so this step alone will put you at least one month ahead of the competition.

Robotic valets in parking garages

Everything else is automated, it seems, so why not parking garages?

Enter Boomerang, a free-roaming system of robotic valets that can move an automobile in any direction, anywhere in the garage. Because there is no rail to restrict the under-the-car robot, parking is being taken to a new direction -- up, down and even around.

Boomerang is a form of automated guided vehicle. AGVs, which increase efficiency and reduce costs, were brought to the market in the 1950s by Barrett Electronics of Northbrook, Ill., to move goods from one place to another in its warehouse.

All kinds of AGVs exist, mostly industrial. The Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands employs more than 100.

In the Boomerang application, the driver pulls the car onto the lot and leaves it. A free-roaming robot, traveling on markers or wires embedded in the floor, picks up the car and takes it to a parking space.

Then, when the driver returns, the robot finds the car and brings it back to the spot where it was left. No human needs to touch the car once the driver locks the doors.

All the garage operator has to do is push a button and the car is stored. Push a button again and it is retrieved.

Headquartered in Logan, Utah, Boomerang is the brainchild of Stan Checketts, who built S&S Worldwide Inc. into a leading supplier of amusement-park thrill rides.

Have you been to the Stratosphere hotel-casino in Las Vegas? The Big Shot atop the 1,149-foot tower that shoots you straight up into the sky is a Checketts ride.

The company has created 150 major rides and 180 kiddie rides in 27 countries, including, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, one of the world's fastest roller coasters, an air-launched missile in Japan that accelerates from zero to 100 miles per hour in less than two seconds and reaches a top speed of 107.

Now Checketts has turned his precision-engineering talents to the self-storage and parking businesses.