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

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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!

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Landlord Video Tips – Good Tenants, Bad Tenants and The Eviction Spiral

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Dealing With Good & Bad Tenants

I'm caught in an eviction spiral?I’ve mentioned this previously, and you may have heard part of this before if you’ve been following me for a while, but good tenants are incredibly valuable to a landlord.

They make your job so much easier it’s like having an assistant to take the workload off of you. Hopefully you’ve experienced this already, but if you haven’t these are the tenants who call immediately when there is a problem with an appliance, something with the property or if there is any type of issue.

They don’t call to complain, they call to make you aware, That can be a very distinguishing factor. They don’t make demands and often they have already dealt with the issue, they just wanted to make sure you were aware.

An example I have of this is a tenant who called me after the fact to tell me the smoke detector quit working. They tried changing the battery, but it still didn’t work right, so they simply went and bought another one and replaced it and then told me about it. They didn’t demand money for the smoke detector, they didn’t demand I run up and change the battery, they didn’t even imply I should pay for the smoke detector, but I did!

Good tenants like that need to be rewarded and if it involves covering costs, even when they don’t request it, it’s worth it in the long run. But that’s not where it ends. I go over a few other options you can do to keep a great relationship in the following video.

I also go over the issue of bad tenants and how they can drag you into what I call the eviction spiral, so hopefully you get some value out of the information. As always, please leave me a comment if you can, I love to hear your feedback, answer your questions and it also is an incredible incentive to me to know people are actually watching them! Enjoy!

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Landlord Video Tips – Dealing With Tenants – Document, Document, Document

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Documenting Tenant Issues

Ever have a problem with a tenant? Hopefully you never do, but realistically it’s just a matter of time. It might be something as simple as a miscommunication, a misunderstanding or something bigger.

To make sure you reduce these types of problems, and to make sure you have a paper trail if it gets worse, you need to document your interactions with your tenants.

In this video I provide some quick and simple tips for you, enjoy!

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Bill
The Educated Landlord

Landlord Video Tips – Explaining Your Lease To Tenants

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Leases & Tenants, Do They Get It?

Leases can be complicated documents and if your tenants don’t understand everything in your lease, do you know what happens? You develop headaches, often major headaches that not only affect your health, but your pocket book.

So what do you do? It’s easy, explain the lease to your tenant. Don’t just give them a copy to sign and walk away, that’s an easy out. Instead, go through all the major clauses, points, potential issues and the responsibilities of the tenants so you’re not disappointed. The few extra minutes this takes can make the duration of your lease simpler, less stressful and believe it or not, happier!

The accompanying video goes through this and a little bit more to help make sure your job as a landlord is as stress free as possible!

Explaining Your Lease

Explaining your lease to tenants and providing them the necessary tools to accomplish it can help turn you into an educated and informed landlord!

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When it Comes To Leases…

When it comes to leases, not all leases are created equally. 

If you don’t have a custom lease designed for you it would be wise to have one drafted up. Leases tend to be state or province specific, but they can also be customized to benefit you and specifics you may have for your property (that fit within local landlord tenant law).

If you don’t have a lease or want more information about leases check out this article, You Got Your Lease WHERE?

Landlord Video Tips – Better Ads Get Better Tenants

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Write Better Rental Ads And Get Better Tenants

If you don’t want to get better tenants, use ads like this 2br/2ba aprtmnt sty rental, dw.grg $795/mo

Ever see an ad like that before? Can you even read it? Well, neither can tenants so how can you get better tenants if they can’t read your ads?

Sure they might still call off of an ad like this, but just to get an explanation of what all those abbreviations meant in your ad!

It’s pretty simple, if you write better ads with more details and that are more targeted to the tenants you are looking for and you’ll start getting better tenants and trust me, you want better tenants!

The following video will give you a few additional hints and tips that you can use to help make sure your ads attract the tenants you want, need and should have in your property!

I’ve got more tips, more videos and more articles coming, if you don’t want to miss any of them, please take a minute and register your name and email on the top right side of the page and we’ll make sure you get updated with all our posts!

Need more ides about writing better ads for your rental properties?

I have another article where I talk about how to get better tenants by writing better ads that you can find here, The Secrets To Writing Better Ads To Attract Better Tenants.

The tips in that article should help point you in the right direction, plus check out many of our other articles available here to guid you even further in the right direction!

It all starts with better tenants and better tenants make your life as a landlord that much easier.

Need To Evict A Tenant?

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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.

Why Tenants Work FOR The Weekend And Landlords Work ON the Weekend

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Landlords Make Money Long Term, Not Hourly

I just made it home after spending a good part of my weekend working on a rental property and collecting some rent and to me, it’s part of being a landlord. I’m all clean and shiny now and as I sat down at my desk to quickly check some email and questions people left me, it hit me.

Most people won’t make good landlords, because they think like tenants. They worry about time off, they worry about weekends, they worry about the little things. Nowhere at Landlord School (ok, has anyone really gone to Landlord School?), does it say you get weekends off, in fact this tends to be your busiest time, same with evenings.

As a landlord these are the times that tenants are available to meet you. Tenants tend to work nine to five, Monday to Friday and as a landlord you have to work with their free time schedule if you need to meet them. You see they work for a pay check and as a landlord you are working for a longer term reward.

Why Did You Become a Landlord?

Ok, maybe not all of you, as I am well aware there are many reluctant landlords out there, but many of you who became landlord weren’t dreaming about being a landlord. You hear little kids talking about being firemen, police officers, business men, but strangely never landlords?

Rather you were dreaming about creating a steady stream of income each month. Many were even dreaming longer term about having a rental property that became your retirement nest egg. Some were even dreaming about their own Real Estate empire!

The issue with achieving any of these dreams is that it requires the extra work that others won’t put in. It requires sacrificing your time some weekends, it requires having to show  vacant rental properties during the evenings when you would rather be at home with your family and it requires your attention at inopportune times.

This is the sacrifice you make now, so that in five or ten years down the road, you are in a much better situation than the people working their nine to five so they can have their weekends free. Congrats to you for having long term vision and making money long term as a landlord!