Treat Tenants With Respect: It’s Good Business

I am a landlord specializing in providing single-family detached rental houses. Our three-bedroom, one-bath houses are in the east San Gabriel Valley communities of Hacienda Heights, La Puente and Azusa.

In 15 or so years of being in the rental house business, we have developed some effective management techniques that some of your landlord readers may be able to apply in the management of their properties.

Golden Rule: Always treat your tenants with dignity and respect.

Never lose sight of the fact that you cannot succeed in landlording without a cooperative tenant. The tenant, when he pays his rent, makes it possible for you, the landlord, to pay bills and make your expenses.

Just as a merchant needs customers to buy his merchandise to be a successful merchandiser, so does a landlord need:

1--A good long-term tenant.

2--A tenant who pays the rent on time.

3--A tenant who respects the property of others and maintains it as if it were his own.

All things considered, renting to good tenants is surely the best way to run a landlording business. You need the tenant just as much as he needs you. Keeping good tenants is the key to being a successful landlord. Thus, it seems that the prudent landlord should go out of his way to keep good tenants.

Let’s talk about a few common-sense but winning techniques for keeping good tenants:

--Be friendly at all times but not chummy.

--Be reasonable at all times in your relationship.

--Make an extra effort to please them at certain times.

--Tend immediately to their reasonable requests for repairs.

--Greet them when they first move in with a friendly hello or a note of welcome on their front door.

--Provide them with useful written information for coping with emergencies that pertain to the property.

--Memorize all of your tenants’ names. People like to be remembered.

--At the tenant’s one-year anniversary in your property, send a complimentary letter to the tenant’s employer. Check with tenants first to get permission and the name of his immediate superior.

--Sometime during the holiday season, send your tenants holiday greetings or small gifts to express your gratitude for their having been your good tenants.

--Include your good tenants in your efforts to obtain other good tenants.

--Offer to repaint their dwelling if it hasn’t been painted in three or more years.

--Stay in constant touch and let them know you care about them and their loved ones’ well-being.

--Respect their right to privacy at all times.

--Whenever possible, hire tenants to work for you. Tenants appreciate the opportunity to pick up some extra money.

It doesn’t take long before the tenant realizes that you are truly not the unscrupulous landlord they had envisioned and that you care about their well-being. They will come to see you as a landlord who values them as good tenants and will reciprocate by being good tenants.

What goes around, comes around. Being a rotten landlord begets having rotten tenants.