The Educated Landlord

Making Landlording Easier

You are here: Home / Archives for Property Management

Bed Bugs – Pests In My Rental Property Part Two

By

Bed Bugs – A Landlords Nightmare

Landlords and bed bugs - pests in my rental propertySo, here we are a week later and if you read my previous post where we first discovered we pests in my rental property (if you haven’t read it yet, please start here and then come back Bed Bugs Part 1), you’re probably curious to see how I dealt with them.

Well, I’m still actually dealing with these pests in my rental property, so it’s not over, but the good news is, our treatment is working after initially messing it up. Just to get you back up to speed, I initially had two options to get rid of them.

Bed Bug Treatment Options

Option one was spraying. This was going to require minimum three treatments and typically four or five. Each treatment costs around $600 and the overall effectiveness is around 90%. Part of the problem being where you catch the bugs during their life cycles.

If they are sprayed, haven’t died yet and then lay more eggs, you have to repeat with another spray and so on and so on, until you catch them at the right time. The downside being a) it’s not 100% effective, b) they become resistant to the pesticides over time requiring stronger and stronger chemicals and c) no one can be in the property during the spraying because of these chemicals for six hours. Then even after six hours, do you really want to be around the chemicals?

Option two is heat treatment. This works out to also require three treatments as the property has two upper levels and a finished basement. So one day in the basement, one day on the main floor and the third day on the upper level. The positive is this is 100% effective as they superheat the house to 120 degrees fahrenheit for several hours which kills the bugs themselves and I can only guess poaches the little eggs before they hatch rendering them inert.

This can be even more expensive though as it’s $1150 per day around here plus travel costs. Also, the tenants could stay for the first two treatments, although the house will be very warm, but on the third day I would have to put them up in hotels or find other alternatives, so it would easily be $4,000 for this approach.

Now fortunately, my pest fellow also introduced me to another option involving traps and dry ice. These involve small plastic containers with a center area where dry ice is placed and an outer ring that is covered in a fine talcum powder.

Bed Bug Traps

Using Dry Ice to Trap Bed Bugs - pests in my rental propertyUsing the dry ice traps was going to be considerably cheaper as the traps themselves cost about $120 for 24, plus the dry ice, which at the time I had no idea what the costs would be. It turns out for around 6 Kilos or 13 pounds, it’s just under $40 and I need that much each time I set up the traps.

The idea is you load up the traps, the dry ice which is CO2 evaporates and the bugs are attracted to the trap as the CO2 is what attracts them to people as they sleep. Once they climb over the outside wall of the container, they get trapped in the talcum area with the powder and can no longer climb out.

You simply go back the next day, empty the trap of all the bugs in the toilet and reload and repeat until there are no more bugs. Simple right? Well we really only learn from our mistakes…

Mistake number one, I picked up the traps on the Friday, went and bought my dry ice from one of the few local places that sell it, and proceeded to the property to set up the traps. I managed to roll this all into some other appointments that day and had all the traps set up by shortly after one in the afternoon and proceeded home to strip out of my clothes and set up a couple traps around my clothes in case I had brought visitors home with me.

Now it was waiting time! And learning time….

Apparently dry ice has a fairly short shelf life. So when I looked at my traps at home around nine that night, it was almost all evaporated, and by ten, completely gone. Since bed bugs are nocturnal, I wasn’t so sure how well this was going to work. My traps at home had nothing in them, which was good, I hoped, but the true test would be checking the property the next day.

The Next Day

So fast forward to checking the traps for bed bugs at the property and nothing. Absolutely nothing!! Just to complicate things even more, the dry ice place wasn’t open Saturday, Sunday or the Monday which was a holiday, so at this point I didn’t know if they simply didn’t work, if I set them too early, or if I really did have bed bugs!

Fast forward even more now to Tuesday. I’ve done some research and I’ve talked to my pest guy. He tells me that I should have caught something, even during the day if there was a huge infestation, maybe just maybe I only had a couple male bugs, and no females and I got lucky, but I’m best off trying again.

My research on dry ice helped me avoid a major catastrophe as I planned on buying more of it, taking it home and storing it in my freezer until that night when I would go out and re-set the traps. Apparently the extremely low temperatures of dry ice will cause freezers to shut down, instead you need to use coolers to slow down the evaporation and the coolers cannot be air tight as the gas needs to seep out. I was glad I did some research!

So picked up the ice, brought it home, put it in the cooler and off that night to set the traps around 7:30 and once again, I wait.

The Day After The Weekend After

So it’s Wednesday by now, time to see what if anything I’ve caught and lo and behold “Thar be bugs”! It looks like I’ve caught about 8 of them in the various traps spread around the rooms. All of them are very very tiny which indicates to my pest fellow that these are young bugs and I may have caught them fairly early in the cycle. That’s a good thing!

So Thursday night I repeat the process, I catch even more and here we are on Friday where I’m heading out this afternoon to buy a large order of dry ice which I’ll store over the weekend so I can make three more trips. I’ve been buying it in 6 Kilo batches, but for the weekend due to the decay of it, I’m going to pick up probably 30 Kilos so I still have some left over for Sunday.

The trick now is to stay on top of this every day until my traps remain empty. The positive is, it seems to be making a difference, none of the tenants are reporting any new bites and  the traps I set up at home haven’t caught anything which is making my wife very happy.

I’ve also found multiple other variants on dry ice traps explained out on the internet and I’m not sure if they will work better, worse, are easier to work with or would be harder, but this is working for me, so I will just carry on.

It does require cooperative tenants and they see that I am trying to help them which really helps, and hopefully by mid next week and for around $600 in total I should have this solved! Fingers crossed!

As always, love to hear your thoughts and any feedback you may have.

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

By

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!

Interview With a Landlord

By

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

Landlord Video Tip – Saving Time With Future Ads

By

Rental Ad Time Saver

Inevitably you end up with a vacancy and suddenly you have to fill that vacant property again. Now you’ve got to try and find all those old pictures, remember what you wrote about in your last ad and then compile it all together again so you can start filling up your space.

Does this sound familiar? If you have multiple properties the problem compounds as you try to keep them all straight. Fortunately I have a solution for you, actually a couple solutions.

In the following video, I’ll go through how to save your time later by taking some action and being pro-active now. then after you’ve watched the video, I have an additional tip to help you out below.

As always, I love to hear any feedback you have and I also appreciate it if you can like and share the video and the post with other landlords you know. So here’s today’s video,

Was that helpful? Is it something you can implement today to help your landlord business in the future?

I talked about the creation of folders on computer as well and this is one of the best tips I can recommend to you. We have folders for each of our properties, folders for our rental forms and folders for almost every stage and type of form we use.

A quick review shows folders for each company, for rental forms, for purchase forms, for our shared accommodation properties and even for faxes/notices.  All logically broken out so we can find them quickly. Well logically to us at least.

Anyway, as per the video, when we write up our ads, we store copies of them in the appropriate folder and also the images we use for our ads. We don’t just limit it to a couple images, but keep adding as tenants and the look of the property changes so we have a range of pictures we can use.

So again I ask, have you already done something like this, or is it something you can start? My plan for the next few months is to try and add one new either video tip or post for you per week. Looking forward to any feedback you may have!

Landlord Video Tips – How To Get Great Photos For Rental Ads

By

Photos of your rental propertyIn this video I have a handy tip to help you get great looking photos for use in your advertising.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and when it comes to making your rental property stand out, having a great picture in your ad can make all the difference. The problem is, how do you make an empty living room stand out?

That’s where today’s tip comes into play. In fairness, this won’t always work for you, and it won’t always work in all properties. It depends on your tenants, the properties condition and your tenants cooperation. Hopefully by now you’re looking forward to the video, so go take a look!

Oh and don’t forget, leave us some feedback, if you like the video, be sure to like it and share it with other landlords and if you have questions you’d like me to answer in a video, just leave it in the comment section below! Happy Landlording!

If you haven’t registered, how will you know when the next video is ready? If you’re not registered, scroll up to the top and fill in your name and email on the top right of the screen and I’ll update you when I have the next video up, plus you’ll get more articles, tips and ideas on how to be a more profitable and better educated landlord.

Landlord Video Tips – Screening Your Tenants

By

Screening Your Tenants –
Make It a Priority!

Once you let a tenant into your property, you could be stuck with them for better or worse. So why not make sure it’s for better?

Diligently screening your tenants can make the difference between months of late payments and arguments or having the best possible tenants out there.

This quick video gives you some reminders and pointers to watch out for!

Are you screening your tenants? Are you screening them well?

It’s one of the biggest challenges new landlords run into. They don’t know the tricks bad tenants use to fool landlords, the tricks they use to get great referrals (fake referrals that is) and they have no clue where to find, how to read or what to do about credit reports.

Yet mastering that should probably be their first priority.

If you can master finding good tenants who will make your property better, with fewer headaches, less problems and typically stay longer, wouldn’t you make that a priority?

That’s where a good screening process comes into play and is what I talk about in the video.

It’s also why I created my How To Screen Tenants Like An Educated Landlord Course. I used to offer this as a simple five email course, but I decided to ramp it up a couple years ago to make it a simple step by step process to help more landlords get good tenants.

And that meant more than just the basics.

With my course I start teaching you about screening your tenants by showing you how to write ads that attract the best tenants, that do some of your screening for you to make your job easier and to help stop deadbeat tenants from even bothering to call.

Then I teach you what to ask and why. This is part of the 7 Questions That Landlords Need To Ask guide, just much more in depth.

From there you go all the way through the paperwork process, secrets about releasing keys and even what to do with applicants who you’ve rejected.

If you’re a landlord who’s ever had problems finding good tenants, this course will make you wonder why you didn’t know about it sooner.

If you want to learn the best methods of screening your tenants, follow this link and get started educating yourself today,

How To Screen Tenants Like an Educated Landlord

Screening your tenants properly can reduce headaches significantly

Need To Evict A Tenant?

By

Basic Steps When You Need To Evict A Tenant

Learn the basic eviction steps to avoid tenant frustrationYou’ve concluded that it’s time to evict your tenant, now what? First, in just about every jurisdiction in North America tenants have rights. As an educated landlord, it’s important you understand the basics of those local landlord and tenant rights.

These basics become even more important when it comes to evicting a tenant. This becomes the how and why of an eviction. Do you need to provide tenants with a 14 day eviction notice? Or is it 30 days? Does it even need to be written or does a verbal notice count?

Perhaps more importantly, are you even allowed to evict them for the reason you intend? Some regions are so biased towards protecting tenants that what you believe is grounds for eviction could get you sued for an illegal eviction attempt.

I’m all for protecting tenants rights, but the rules should be fair to both sides, and sometimes when you look closely, this may not be the case. This is even more reason for you to know the local eviction legislation before you have to need it.

As some quick absurd examples, some regions make it illegal to evict tenants in the winter. You still have to make your mortgage payments, but bad tenants get to stay on until it’s warm outside.

Other areas make it illegal to evict tenants for having pets, even if it’s against the lease or it was decided before they moved into the one bedroom apartment that you couldn’t accept their Great Dane. Some of the tenant legislation out there simply protects tenants from their own stupidity. I don’t think I can put it any other way.

You also have to understand what you cannot do to help tenants along. This ranges from threatening your tenants, which is a big no no just about everywhere, to disconnecting utilities. I’ve even heard of landlords  taking away front doors “for repair” and having this take several days to complete. I don’t know anywhere where this is legal and in many places it could result in substantial fines and charges against the landlord.

Learn The Local Landlord Tenant Laws

So what can a landlord do? Well as I mentioned, first step is to learn the basic eviction laws in your area. Often you can find this out through a quick Google search for “landlord tenant rules” or “landlord tenant bylaws” and by adding your local city, town, state or province.

With any luck, there is a local government number you can call for information or at least a website or two that provides the basic information. This can put you on the right track and get you started.

Depending on where you are, this could lead to a tribunal system where they have hearings to determine whether tenants should be evicted or provided extra time. Or it might involve a much simpler system of just providing written notice that you are terminating a lease and need to include why. At this point, it’s your job to understand your options.

What Did The Tenant Say?

The next piece of advice that has become invaluable for me when evicting a tenant is to document everything. I’m not just talking about the eviction part either. I try to document all the interactions I have with my tenants. For the ultra organized, this might involve keeping files for each rental property/tenant you have.

My preference is to use email to follow up on conversations. I can recap verbal conversations in the email and any decisions that came about and send it off to the tenant. Now I have a written record I can fall back on which can be very handy if problems pop up later.

By having everything documented, it prevents an eviction turning into a he said/she said situation, especially when you can provide an email string showing everyone was aware of what was happening.

So there you have it. That is the basics of evicting a tenant. Learn the local landlord tenant legislation and document everything. If you can spend some time in advance learning the rules, it can help you avoid many problems before they even come up, but better late than never. As for documenting everything, this can be a good idea for just about anything.