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Every Time I Think I Have Seen It All, Bed bugs…

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Bam, Something Else Pops Up To Bug Me

Just when everything is going right

I’ve been doing the landlord business for a decade now and every time I think I’ve seen it all, something new happens. Maybe I should just quit thinking?

You see enough as a regular landlord, but when you add furnished rooms into the fold, it exponentially increases your exposure to new events, experiences and yes horror stories.

In the last 10 years, I’ve found bullets left behind in rooms (that gets you thinking), knives, home made weapons, crack pipes, needles, pills and drugs. I’ve evicted tenants for non-payment of rent, damage to properties, threatening other tenants, fighting with other tenants and threatening me.

I’ve broken up parties at 1:00 in the morning, talked tenants into putting down knives at 5 in the morning, called the police in to remove tenants and made court appearances to help put tenants in jail.

I’ve had the police contact me as I was the first contact on a recently evicted tenants cell phone when he was found dead, I’ve had a tenant die in a property and I’ve been the one to “discover” the body. I’ve even had what appeared to be a minor home invasion. What else is there for me to learn, see, or happen to me?

Ooops, I Shouldn’t Have Asked

I’ve had skunks, mice, wasps and all manners of pests in the past disrupt my tenants, my properties and my business, but now, I’ve got a new one to add to the list. Bed bugs…..

Bed bugs have become a huge problem throughout North America and Europe and with the number of properties I have and the types of tenants I deal with it’s been amazing I haven’t run into this before, but finally I’ve been hit.

So, as with all my experiences, I need to share it not to freak you out, but to let you know the options you have if you run into a similar situation.

First, if you’re not familiar with bed bugs here’s a little background.

Most importantly, in my opinion, bed bugs are not a sign of unsanitary conditions. Bed bugs are showing up everywhere. From jails and court houses to hospitals and five star hotels, you can find them everywhere and it’s created a thriving business for pest control companies.

These tiny little bugs are about the size of a grain of rice and can flatten themselves into just about any space imaginable.They feed off of human blood and are attracted by CO2 which we give off when we breathe.

To make it easier for them to find CO2 and of course their meals, nature has deemed it necessary to fit them with a type of infra red vision allowing them to see at night and to see the CO2 as we exhale it from our body. This infra red vision also makes them rather adverse to light.

All these traits are what attracts them to their lunch, us, while we sleep. Being so small and being able to flatten themselves allows them to live in the seams of mattresses, couches and even under the baseboards away from prying eyes during the daytime. But once we go to sleep, the buffet is open.

Common signs are little red welts and as the infestation grows, the increase of the welts. Strangely, some people are barely bothered, while others are magnets to them. In my scenario, the female tenant is getting eaten alive, while the boyfriend is getting ignored.

Dealing With Bed Bugs

The problem obviously is how to get them out of my property and learning anything I can to help prevent it in the future. So first the bad news, I can’t prevent it from happening again.

The nature of these bugs is to attach themselves to humans, clothes, furniture and anything nearby. In apartment buildings, or buildings in general, they can get into the walls, under baseboards and travel great distances in both a self preservation tactic and for food.

In talking to the pest person Don (who has been incredibly helpful), he’s informed me that the bugs go through several stages before they start laying eggs, but this is a rather small window of time. And once they hit that stage, the females lay five eggs per day, every day. Talk about your exponential problem exploding quickly.

Oh, and they try to travel as far as they can to lay the next batch further spreading themselves throughout a property. This means once you find out you have them, you’re probably already in trouble.

To try and get rid of them, you can vacuum the mattresses, all your furniture and then bag and treat them with chemicals or discard them. But you’re not done. They are likely still in your clothes, linens and carpets, maybe even in the walls.

To kill them in your clothes and linens, you need to wash everything at the highest heat setting on your washing machine and then the hottest heat in your dryer to dry them thoroughly. And that still leaves the things you cannot wash.

This leaves you with two options. More chemicals or heat. The problem with chemicals is the more we treat pests with pesticide, the more they become resistant, plus the after effects on our children, our pets, our homes and ourselves is possibly years away from us discovering. Chemicals = bad!

The heat option though also has a challenge. It’s freaking expensive! Now costs will obviously range and they may be lower or higher depending on where you’re located, but for perspective the cost to treat my entire property with chemicals is around $600 here.

It would take minimum two treatments, possibly three and usually four or five. With a chance of success of maybe 90%. the problem being the timing and the effectiveness of the chemicals. It doesn’t kill them immediately, there may be eggs not quite hatched between sprays and you may be just off by a couple days of their life cycle leading to even more sprayings being required.

The property I am dealing with is two stories plus a finished basement. Due to the size of the place it will require three treatments of heat, one in the basement on day one, one on the main floor on day two and then upstairs on day three. Each of these treatments is just under $1,200 plus travel costs. So $3,600 plus, woohoo.

The upside? The heat treatment is pretty well 100% effective. What happens with the heat treatment is they pump in air heated by a generator and keep the temperature above 120 degrees fahrenheit (that’s 49 degrees Celsius!) for several hours to kill the bugs, the eggs and almost anything else alive in the house. Each day of doing this is the equivalent of eight months of heating for a normal home cost wise. Hence the big charge.

It’s enough to make you debate whether owning a rental property is worthwhile!

Now Watch Me Pull A Rabbit Out Of My Hat

A CO2 Bed Bug Trap, I hopeBut, there may be one other solution which is what I’m working on starting today. Bed bug traps.

My pest guy informed me of a new tactic that seems to be working very effectively, although it can take several days to a week or two to work. It uses a simple trap that uses dry ice to attract the bugs and then traps them.

As dry ice warms up, it emits CO2 also known as the bed bug dinner bell. This CO2 attracts the bugs, they climb up the side of these small plastic trays to get to lunch and then the inside of the tray is treated with talcum powder which sticks to them, impedes their ability to crawl up the steep sides and they perish in the tray.

These trays have to be emptied every day and you need to put anywhere from four to ten trays in a room to make it effective and depending on the room size. There are also some issues about too much CO2 in a room where people may be sleeping, so good ventilation may be required.

Using this technique, after about four or five days the number of bugs should dwindle down to hopefully nothing, or you just carry on for several more days until nothing new appears.

In my situation, I’m currently booking for the heat truck which they tell me is about 7-10 days down the road and in the meantime I’m filling my place with these trays. If the trays work effectively it is going to cost me a few hundred dollars by the time I am done and I will be bug free. Then I can cancel the heat truck.

If they do not work, I still have the heat truck coming and it’s back to the expensive plan. So please cross your fingers with me and let’s hope that this trap solution will work. If it does, it saves me over $3,000, it should fix things up fairly quickly and I can test some of my other properties just in case.

One More Warning

Remember how I mentioned these bugs attach themselves to clothing? Well, Don also cautioned me and said there is a chance a few may have attached themselves to my clothing while I was there searching for them.

I may have introduced them to my home!

Needless to say, I’m bringing a couple of the traps home to see if I catch anything.  Both my wife and I are already having trouble sleeping as just the thought of this has made us psychologically unbalanced and now we are imaging bugs when none have actually been seen. And hopefully none will be seen! Watch for updates and be sure to share any stories you may have to help others.

Hey, if you’re following along, you can find part two of me Dealing With Bed Bugs Here!

You Need Your OWN Real Estate Plan

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Your Real Estate Plan Has To Work For You

Do You Have A Real Estate Investing Plan

I received some great feedback on the recent video about having a plan, (if you didn’t watch it, you may want to jump over here first, You Need A Plan). But there’s more to it.

It seems in the last week, people have just been appearing out of no where asking me questions about getting into Real Estate investing. And they’re not just asking me, they are asking other people they know as well. Which is great, but they are getting different answers everywhere they go, which is a problem.

As an example, a friend I just talked to the other day talked to another landlord friend who has about eight properties, so this other landlord is obviously is pretty serious about it. He’s sold all of his up down suites in high demand rental areas and bought single family properties in better neighborhoods.

He had quite a few of them previously and due to headaches of having extra tenants and managing properties further a field, he’s changed what he’s doing. He has a new plan. And that’s great, but it’s his plan!

This other landlord owns another business which has employees and his time is occupied with his main money earner, his company. I can see why he would want less tenants and to move things closer and simpler.

Now I don’t actually know him, but I would suggest his goal is to create a nice side retirement nest egg for himself with the rental properties and they also make a safe simple investment. The bulk of his time has to be devoted to his thriving business which is the real money earner and the real retirement vehicle.

This is significantly different than someone who may be considering turning Real Estate investing into their career.

Again I Say, You Need Your Own Plan

Follow your own Real Estate investing plan

If your intent is to buy a property or two as an investment, keep it fairly hands off and simple and your goal is to simply pay the mortgage down over time and have a retirement nest egg in 25 or 30 years, maybe a single family property closer to you is the way to go.

When you’re buying an investment property, you just have to understand the trade offs and what suits you.

With a single family home for example, you lose in the following areas.

  • Overall Cash Flow is Lower
  • Smaller Base Of Renters For This Type of Property
  • Longer Periods of Vacancy

Cashflow is usually just a few hundred dollars more than expenses on single family homes (unless you’ve owned it for many many years). The types of tenants that can afford to rent a whole house, also typically have enough income to purchase, so this subset of renters make up a smaller percent of the total base of renters actively looking for places to live. And you end up with longer periods of vacancy due to having a smaller base of renters.

The positive trade off is often they are better tenants and this equates to less headaches and/or time. If that’s what your goal is then this may fit your plan.

For someone with high income, and little time who is looking at this as a long term investment (15 years plus), this may be an ideal plan for investing in Real Estate.

But what if your goal is to get out of the job you have and not have to worry about income from your job? What if, like me, you intended to make Real Estate investing your full time career? Or at least a huge portion of your retirement nest egg? Then you need a different plan.

Then you need to focus on cashflow, because cash flow is what makes the rental market flourish for a landlord. When you have an up down suite or a side by side duplex with two incomes and you’re generating $500 per month of cashflow, or $800 or even $1,000 on one single property it takes a considerable amount of pressure off the amount of income you earn independent of your Real Estate..

It also gives you space to manoeuvre if the rental market slows down. And it will slow down. It might not be this year, or the next year, but in most areas the Real Estate market is cyclical. That single family home you were making a couple hundred dollars off of works fantastic when vacancy rates are 2 or 3%, but when they push up to 6 or 7%, rents start slipping down due to competition. If you’re in Detroit, well all bets are off.

Preparing For Downturns

Real Estate Does Go Down in ValueWith a $1,000 monthly cashflow dropping rents on two units  by $200 each makes you more competitive and still gives you some nice cashflow. Even on $500 cash flow, losing $400 will be painful, but you’re still positive and if you lose one person, you’re not having to cover the full payment yourself.

With a solid plan, you have a plan B, a contingency to deal with these scenarios. Raising and lowering rents and still surviving is an option.

With a single family home the amount you can cut is much lower and with higher vacancies due to a smaller rental pool having your property vacant for two, three or even four months can be a killer. When you only have $100 or maybe $300 cash flow in good times, you better have lots of extra income to support it, but maybe that’s part of your plan?

So obviously I’m biased, but I’ve seen what works. I’ve been through sub 1% vacancy rates and vacancy rates around 8%. I’ve had tenants offering to take places unseen during low vacancy periods and I’ve had properties languish for months vacant during the last downturn. Through it all I’ve recognized that cash flow is indeed king and it’s a recurring theme I push on this site to new landlords.

Ultimately though, it comes down to your plan. Some of it’s your comfort levels. Some is your available time and where you eventually want to be with it. If you don’t have the time to manage extra rental units, maybe you need to be prepared to hire property managers. If you’re investment window is 30 years, it’s about the end result not what’s happening right now, so you have to plan accordingly.

The important part being the planning. In some upcoming articles I’ll talk about renting out condos and other types of rental properties. If you have some thoughts on this though, I’d love to hear them!

 

 

What’s Your Plan? Or Do You Have one?

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Your Landlord Plan

Blueprints for your landlord business- have a planIt’s amazing how often a landlords plan it to invest in a rental property and rent it out. There done, that’s my plan. But is it a plan or is it a part of a plan.

In the following video I talk a little bit more about landlord plans and hope to provide you with some clearer thoughts about what your landlord plan should be.

I experimented with some close ups (sorry if I scare anyone), and my new microphone had the volume levels too low so hopefully you can still hear it. As always, love to hear any feedback you may have so leave me a comment, send me an email and be sure to share with any other landlords you may know.

Hey, if you have a plan and want to share it for inspiration for other new landlords out there, we’d love to hear it so leave a comment below. Hope this video helps with your landlord education. As always, if you have other areas you’d like to see videos or articles on, let me know.

Landlord Plans Update

I just finished a chat with an aspiring landlord this morning. He’s nearing the end of month three and getting ready to start month four of his two month renovation before it’s ready for tenants.

He had a plan, but couldn’t stick to it for various reasons. And that’s fine, sometimes your landlord plan has to change to fit the landlords situation!

Just remember that plan is what will get you to the end, so if you have to adjust your plan, make the adjustment to continue to move you forward.

With the fellow I talked to this morning, his challenge was lack of time as he was doing all the work. To help him get back on track I recommended his plan change to include some paid workers to get the property back on track.

His two month over run cost him not just his mortgage payments, but utilities, taxes, insurance and his lost time. Worse yet, he had tenants lined up and the delay could end up costing him another month of vacancy once he’s done.

Spending $1,00 even $2,000 to get it done, now, will change the plan, but it will get ti back on track as well.

So the lesson here is be ready to adjust and correct plans that don’t work!

Renting Out Rooms – Running A Rooming House

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Running A Rooming House As A Rental Option

Running a rooming house and renting out roomsThe longer I’ve been in Real Estate, the more ways I’ve seen to make money with Real Estate.

Whether it’s flipping properties, rent to own strategies, buy and hold or any of the myriad categories in between, there are simply dozens and dozens of ways to make money in Real Estate and running a rooming house is one area I specialized in.

Now, word of warning, rooming houses aren’t for everyone! Just like some individuals can’t handle the stress of flipping and others can’t handle the stress of dealing with tenants, rooming houses require a specific mentality to balance everything out.

Rooming houses as a category typically come with a poor reputation. With stories of problem tenants, drugs, sketchy areas and more it scares many potential landlords off before they even start. And truthfully, it can be this way, but it doesn’t have to be.

So what does running a rooming house involve? It’s usually a home or a building that rents out rooms on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Most are furnished, and they typically provide shared washrooms, possibly kitchens and possibly laundry areas.

They also tend to cater to people at the lower end of the rental system who may not qualify for typical rentals or who don’t wish to be tied down to extended leases.

Folks who cannot afford deposits or first and last months rent, people who tend to deal in cash and people who get paid weekly.

These are your normal rooming house tenants, sounds appealing so far doesn’t it?

Our First Rooming House

It was in 2004 that we bought our first “rooming house” style property and we bought it for a couple reasons. First it was the other half of a duplex we had already purchased earlier form the owner and second, cash flow. Huge stinking cash flow!

Rooming House kitchenYep, we were suckered in by money and we quickly learned some lessons about running a rooming house. This particular property was set up with three rooms downstairs that were rented out on a weekly basis as furnished room rentals and the owner lived in a suite upstairs. They had a makeshift kitchen in the basement crammed in with the laundry. With all three rooms full we would make in two weeks what a normal basement suite generated in a month.

Our thoughts were to upgrade the basement units a bit and to rent out the upstairs to an onsite manager who would deal with collecting rents, signing people in and out etc.. The former owner had mattresses on the floor, supplied black and white 13″ TV’s and was typical of rooming house landlords. We have learned consistently not to be typical!

First thing we did was replace the mattresses with new futons that allowed the guys to have beds or couches in the limited space, we got rid of the crappy TV’s and upgraded them to 20″ color TV’s and brought in night side tables and a few other “upgrades”. Two of the rooms were already occupied, so we painted the hallways, the other room and generally updated what we could, but it was still a cheap rooming house, sigh.

My First Negative Experience

Needless to say the rules involving running a rooming house and for renting out to weekly tenants are often considerably different than renting out to longer term tenants in regular rentals. Due to the high turnover, the cash based business, the timing required and the type of tenants, credit checks are simply not done. That’s the first challenge with running a rooming house.

People show up cash in hand and need a place now typically. There’s no two or three day waiting period to check references or get reports back, it is cash and carry. This leads to all sorts of “fun characters” and takes us to my first negative experience which took place within the first month of taking over.

The key to making this work is to stay on top of the tenants. Rent is due weekly and it must be paid on time. See any problems yet….

Within the first month I put in a new fellow, sketchy would be putting it mildly, but he had cash in hand, By the end of the first week I had complaints from one of the other longer term tenants. He was leaving dishes in the sink, he would forget to lock the door, typical problems and things that have to be dealt with quickly.

I was due to collect rent so my wife and I headed over to get rent, do some more work to improve the place and make sure it looked ok. At this point I need to bring up the fact I was brand new to this and had only been a landlord of any capacity for just over a year, so I didn’t necessarily know the rules, or follow them…

Don’t Try This At Home Folks

I knocked on buddy’s door and I could hear him moving in there, but he didn’t answer. So I knocked louder. Still nothing, I told him I could hear him, still nothing. So being a frustrated landlord I broke the rules and the law and unlocked his door to confront him.

To add some perspective I stand around 6’2″, weighed around 220 pounds and I’m reasonably athletic (at least at the time). Buddy was 5’8″ maybe 150 pounds, so I wasn’t worried about a confrontation, although I was getting my money, I hoped.

When I open the door, I find buddy sitting on the floor, needle in hand and likely just finished shooting up. Being a calm, rational person I did what anyone else would do. I blew up! I told him he had 15 minutes to vacate (also against the rules, but by his glazed yet fearful expression he understood it was time to leave).

I went and explained to my wife what had happened and the door to the basement opened and the tenant I thought I had confronted walked in. I had just evicted someone who wasn’t even supposed to be there. In my defence, there were no lights on in the room, they both had long shaggy dirty blonde hair, they had the same build and I had only met him once.

I explained to him what I found, told him as well, 15 minutes be gone. I gave him 15 minutes, went back to the door and he had his stuff packed and was ready to go, then I noticed the TV was missing. When I politely inquired about it he told me that someone had come to take it away to fix it. I went from seeing red to seeing crimson and told him he had about 1 minute to get the hell out, to forget about his security deposit and to avoid me for the rest of his likely short life. Welcome to running a rooming house and the experience of renting out rooms.

Rooming house info and resources Click to get more info about rooming or boarding houses

That Was Then

We were ready to shut down that experiment, but for some reason struggled through and learned some valuable lessons. About six months later someone else approached us with a rooming house they hoped to sell. This time though, it was a full duplex at a price we couldn’t refuse. It had ten rooms in total and when full generated almost $6,000 in gross income every month.

With new systems and process in place from our earlier mistakes, we continued to expand and at our peak had eight rooming properties and over 50 individual rooms that I dealt with on a weekly basis. That equates to collecting rent 2,600 times in a year if I was 100% occupied. Talk about an advanced lesson in landlording and running a rooming house business.

Now, many years later, would I do it again?

Definitely, although I know I would make numerous changes along the way.

Would I recommend it to everyone?

Not really.

Although there are many that could make some huge income off of this. The income from that one duplex alone was over $30,000 per year, even after vacancies and expenses. Plus, it’s almost doubled in value from our original purchase price.

Is it a lot of work, yes, but is it 40 hours a week? No, usually only four or five per week which makes it an exceptional return on the investment.

The point of today’s article isn’t to get you to thinking about rooming houses as an investment, but rather to get you thinking about other opportunities available out there. I preach that up down rentals with detached garages, in my opinion, are the best way to go as far as good rental properties, but I also own condos, single family homes and yes rooming houses.

In some of my interviews with other landlords and in conversations, many are doing great with everything from vacation rentals to furnished executive rentals to single family homes. So there is no one right way. you just need to find the right way for you and then learn as much as you can to specialize in that area.

Rooming House Examples

Screening TenantsWhen we started to expand with our properties we had simple rules we stuck with. The properties we felt were ideal for running a rooming house had to have at least five rooms  to rent or capability to build up to five rooms. It had to have an upstairs and downstairs bathroom and shower setup, or again space for us to build it.

They had to have great transit access. We understood many of our tenants were new to the city and often took transit, so access was incredibly important. And we had to be close to the work, so our properties were positioned close to industrial areas where many labourers and trades would be working.

Knowing your tenants and their requirements was part of the battle and is something you as a landlord should be aware of as it makes finding and keeping them easier. Understanding what our style of tenant needed made our job of advertising and renting out so much easier.

The other lesson we learned was learning where to find our tenants. We hit up training centres for the trades, unions and even immigration companies about our properties. We took those that were interested on tour and we even found one company who rented an entire house from us for two full years at $4,000 per month to house incoming workers for a major project.

Finally, I’ve incorporated a series of questions I ask people who call my ads. Much like screening my regular tenants, I have filter questions to narrow down my waisted time. All designed to get better people in and to save my time.

So, my challenge for you, even if you have a regular rental, is to make sure you know the benefits of the property you currently have, or if you are planning on buying a new rental property, the nearby benefits. Then find that avatar or perfect tenant and find out where they work, what they do and then go advertise or visit those places in preparation of your next vacancy.

Investing in Real Estate isn’t fire and forget, it’s a business and requires some strategy behind it. Hopefully you enjoyed my long drawn out story and can learn some lessons from it you can apply to your landlord business!

If you liked this article let me know, if you want more stories about my experiences (both good and bad) tell me. Or if you just want more tips and generic landlord advice let me know too!

Just to add to this you may want to read another post I have about rooming houses. you can find it here, Profiting From Rooming Houses 

Boarding House and Rooming House information - Running a Rooming House
Rooming House Resource Page

Rooming House Tips

Guide to Getting Started With Rooming HousesIf you’re serious about running a rooming house or have just started one, I’d highly recommend you check out my Basics of Rooming & Boarding Houses Guide.

It’s $17, includes information on how to determine the best areas for rooming properties, the options for daily, weekly and monthly rentals and it gives you the information I wish I had when I started!

Click here to get your copy now (it’s a PDF, so you can have it in minutes) The Basics of Starting Your Own Rooming House

The Basics Of Running A Rooming House

So, are you intrigued? Does the idea of owning and running a rooming house sound like a journey you might be interested in taking?

Over the years I’ve owned a lot of properties and a lot of rooming houses and it hasn’t all been perfect, but that’s part of the learning curve. Sometimes there are expensive lessons we learn and other times there are inexpensive lessons.

That’s why it’s important to go into this with your eyes wide open.

Running a rooming house is more than just buying a property and putting bodies in.

There are rules and regulations that vary from place to place, city to city and even district to district. There is higher demand in some areas and lesser demand in others which can lead to underperforming properties.

Then there’s the concept of targeting certain segments of the population to develop a steady stream of clients. We learned early that we constantly needed to be advertising as an empty room meant we were losing money. Later we learned who and how to market so that we found our ideal tenants.

Learning all of this took years and not knowing it from the beginning likely cost us tens of thousands of dollars of lost income and bad purchases and nearly causes us to quit before we even got off the ground!!

In hindsight if I could have found training or information to help guide me and avoid those early mistakes it would have been priceless.

But that was my bad luck, or in this case your good luck as I have that information and I have a way to share it with you so you can avoid the costly lessons I learned.

I’ve put the information you need to know before you buy your first Rooming House property into an online training program call The Basics of Rooming Houses.

Now this may not be for you. If you like making mistakes, losing money, getting frustrated and quitting in frustration then you should probably don’t want to consider taking my training as it will make the majority of those painful experiences go away!

However, if you’d like to learn how to determine the local demand for rooms (along with understanding what you can charge for a room) I can help with that.

If you’d like to discover how the rules work in your area for room rentals or rooming house properties I explain how to figure it out and who you can talk to in order to get the details.

Perhaps most importantly, once you get through the initial training I teach you how to start finding more and more tenants so you eventually get to the point where you can live off of referrals and repeat customers! Once you understand how much easier this business is when people are calling you all the time you’ll really start to appreciate it.

I guess it really comes down to how serious you are, or how much money you want to lose on your own..

So if you’re someone willing to learn, to get educated and to get off on the right foot, you’ll want to go sign up for this course and get started today.

Click here to invest in your rooming house education – The Basics of Rooming House Course

Interview With A Landlord – Donna F.

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Interview With A Landlord Series

After the great response regarding my first interview with a landlord, I managed to wrangle another landlord into an interview to help provide some more insights into her landlord business and the overall experience of being a landlord.

I’ve actually known Donna for about six years now and  she has a great story for you in this video interview.

She started with a plan, has a goal and is making her way through it and provides some great advice for other landlords out there. If you’re wondering if it’s possible to create your own landlord business while working a full time job, here story should serve as an example that it is possible and hopefully inspires you as well.

I’m always looking for other landlords to talk to and my hopes are to have one interview a month that I can share with you, so if you have stories you believe will help other landlords with their landlord business or even cautionary tales that will help protect landlords, I’d love to hear from you.

Also, if you’re enjoying these series, let us know! Leave us a comment, share it with friends and tell Donna how she did!

Landlord Tools of the Trade – Painting Tools

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Landlord Tools

Painting Tools for Landlords

Every business has the tools of the trade, whether it’s wrenches for a mechanic, spreadsheet for analysts or even color swatches for designers. Knowing what tools to have can make those jobs easier, faster and hopefully more profitable.

The same can be said for the landlord business. So to provide some ideas of items you may want to have, I’m going to create a few articles with some of the items and tools I use to make my work easier and in turn, hopefully yours too.

Speed Up Your Painting

Hopefully you’ve seen my previous article/video about choosing paint colors (A Quick And Easy Landlord Renovating Tip), if not maybe go take a quick look at it after you’re done here. It gives you some ideas about saving time later and it revolves around painting which is where today’s tools come to play.

Now as much as I would like you to hire someone to come in and do the painting for you, it doesn’t always work that way. Hiring someone may not fit in your budget, you may have plenty of spare time or you may even find it relaxing. So if you’re doing it, make sure you have the right tools to get the job done.

I actually have several of the tools I take with me whenever I have to paint a property in the image at the top of the page. The obvious ones are the huge bucket of paint, the small ladder and the drop clothes. The less obvious ones are the scraper on the floor, the roll of sandpaper (the sanding block actually isn’t in the picture, but you’ll want one of those too) and my handy rolling stick.

Obvious Painting Tools

We buy the large buckets of paint as we use the same color in all of our properties and by purchasing in larger containers we save money. The small ladder allows us to reach the corners and top edges when painting. In my case I’m over 6′ tall, so I don’t need a very larger ladder, you might want to consider a slightly larger one if you need it. My wife actually has one with a shelf to set the paint on and it’s her favorite ladder for painting.

Drop clothes, these should be mandatory! You can purchase them from most paint supply stores, but we also use old sheets and for those paying attention the blue sheets are actually old sheets from the surgery ward in hospitals. No, they weren’t used, but they were thrown out and a friend who worked at the hospital donated them to us. They are AWESOME!

Having drop clothes can save you a ton of clean up after the fact and although it takes a bit more prep time to lay them out, you will be thankful the first time a big glob of paint falls on them.

Less Obvious Tools

The less obvious tools are the scraper for cleaning up edges, removing silicon or for outside wooden frames with pealing paint. The sand paper may actually be one of the most important pieces.

I could probably turn this into a five thousand word article about painting, but to keep your attention, I’ll gloss over a few things, and just do some Coles notes on them. Starting with prepping the walls. The amount of prep work you do prior to painting will really help determine how it looks.

If you spend extra time mudding and sanding any imperfections, patching any plaster that is damaged and scraping any old paint off it will make the finished product so much better. That sandpaper you brought with you is worth it’s weight in gold to accomplishing that goal.

On top of that, doing a quick sanding between coats can also help create a smoother finish along with helping the second and/or third coat adhere better. Don’t skip this step.

That brings me to one other tool we use in concert with the sanding, the painting pole. Obviously we use this with the roller (should I have mentioned the roller as an obvious tool?), but we also have special sanding blocks that attach to the painting pole as well. This makes the process of doing a quick scuff up of the wall fast and easy.

It’s a quick sand, you don’t want to take the paint off, just scuff it a bit to smooth out any imperfections and to allow that next coat to stick more. Trust me, if you haven’t been using a pole already for rolling the walls, just having one will make a huge difference in your speed (and it makes you back feel better too).

Finally, don’t forget a couple plastic bags full of rags. This is dual purpose. The first time you paint a wall a new color you’ll need to do a couple coats. Wrapping your paint brush in a wet rag and leaving it in the fridge over night will help stop the paint from hardening allowing you to come back the next day and apply the second coat.. You’ll also be able to use the rags to touch up any booboos.

The plastic bags (sorry environmentalists) work great with the roller and the rolling tray. If you need to come back later or the next day for coat two, make sure the tray is full of paint, the roller is soaked and then then cover the tray with two bags, one over the thick end first, then across the other end. It keeps the air away from it and allows you again to set it aside until the next day without worrying about the paint hardening or destroying the roller.

Other Painting Tips

This one is a little more advanced and may not work for you, but we don’t use painting tape. We cut in by hand along the ceilings, baseboards (when we don’t remove them first) and door frames. It takes a steady hand and it doesn’t hurt that my wife is an artist as well so she can follow the lines. I’ve just had lots of practice and I stock extra rags in case I mess up…

If this is something you’re going to try, make sure you have a two or three inch wide wedge style paint brush as the wedge shape helps keep that line and we find it’s a bit easier on the hands. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s just having the tip of the brush angle down instead of squared off when you are looking at the brush when it’s flat on the floor. See the image for a visual explanation.

Paintbrushes

If you use drywall mud to patch holes, go over the mud after you patch with a wet rag. It will remove the excess and just leave the filled in hole making the wall look smoother instead of patchy.

You can use stir sticks to stir paint that has been sitting for a while or you can purchase attachments for your drill that will do a much better job of stirring paint. If you do a lot of painting, this attachment can be very handy.

Remove all switch plates and electrical covers and bring a couple boxes to put them in so they don’t get lost. If they are grimy and dirty we often put them in the sink with a little dish soap or cleaner to soak. then we remove them and wipe them down with some of our plentiful rags later and they come out much cleaner. If they aren’t coming out clean, consider purchasing new ones or the work you did making the walls all pretty is for nothing.

Did I miss any handy tips or tools to make your next painting project easier? Do you have some you can share with me? Either way I’d love to hear your thoughts about these tips and whether you would like access to more of the tools I use and how to take advantage of them to their fullest. So leave me a comment below.

Interview With a Landlord

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Can you believe it’s fall already? Time has absolutely flown by and I apologize for the extended layoff with videos and posts. I think putting that Screening Course together in August threw me off further than I thought.

On the positive side, I have more information started that I want to get out to everyone and it starts with an interview I did last week with a landlord I’ve been mentoring for the last four years. I’d known Tim before he started in the landlord business and since he knew what I did, he reached out to find out more about being a Real Estate investor.

I think I gave him enough to get started as it wasn’t too much longer before he picked up his first rental property and now he’s got several in his portfolio and isn’t done yet. With an eye for analyzing potential properties he’s done well in picking some properties with great potential, but he’s also had some hiccups along the way.

In this 8 minute interview Tim sits down with me and goes over some of what he has discovered along the way and shares a bit of his story, I hope you enjoy it.

If you did enjoy this and feel your story would be interesting and informative to others I’d love to set up an interview with you. Since our readers are scattered all over the country I can do interviews via Skype if that works or I can even set up an online meeting to record our conversation.

To get started, email me at info@TheEducatedLandlord.com and let’s help make you famous!

 

Bill