As you can imagine, we get this question a lot, 'I want to rent my home in Birmingham AL - What do I need to know?'
What's up, everybody? Matthew Whitaker here doing another "Questions Owners Ask." Today's question is "I want to rent my home in Birmingham AL, what do I need to know?"
First thing I would say is how important it is to find a good resident.
At the end of the day, if I had to tell you one piece of advice, it is so imperative, find a good resident. So everything that goes with finding a good resident like screening that resident, making sure that resident has fulfilled their obligations in the past, maybe even driving by some previous houses that the resident's lived in. I mean, you need to do a good job, especially if you only have one house, of screening the resident. I would go over and above on this unless you're like us and really used to screening residents. We know what to look for. We even have certain algorithms that we work with, a company to help us find good residents. You may not be able to have access to these algorithms. You're going to have to do some work on the front end to make sure that you're getting a good resident.
The second thing I would do is make sure that your move in inspection.
Because the last thing you want is for the resident to destroy something or make a hole and you don't have a good move in inspection report to go back to. A judge is not going to look kindly on that if you have to go after them in court. If you don't have kind of before pictures to take a look at it will not go well for you. So do a good move in inspection. Hopefully, that won't happen but it's always important to have a good move in inspection.
The next thing I would say is, do a good job keeping up with your accounting.
You have, income, you have expenses, I mean, these are things that are going on your tax return. It's so important that you keep up with every dollar you spend and every dollar that comes in. This becomes a business when you start running houses. We're able to keep up for that for our owners in our accounting software. So at the end of the year, we're able to give our owners report that basically breaks all this down. However, if you're doing it on your own, you need to make sure that you're keeping up with the accounting.
And the last thing is to keep good residents in houses, you must get repairs done quickly.
The number one reason that residents move out of houses is that the repairs aren't being done really quickly. And I just think it's so important to keep good residents in there and you don't want them to move. I mean, the way to make money in this business is to keep good residents in your house long term. I'm Matthew Whitaker and this video answered the common question - I Want To Rent My Home In Birmingham AL - What Do I Need To Know? I hope this was helpful.
