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The Curse of Knowledge

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Are You Smarter Than Your Tenants?

Curse of knowledgeI am blatantly guilty of the curse of knowledge and even though I’m fully aware of it, I often still fall into as it’s a trap that’s tough to escape. Being aware is the first step and this article hopefully helps make you aware.

So what the heck is this curse of knowledge? It’s what happens when you go talk to your mortgage broker, your financial advisor and even your mechanic.

They speak in some sort of gibberish where they use words like amortization, fiduciary standards or ABS control module malfunction. Fully expecting everyone else knows what these words also mean.

Now often we may know some, but as the conversations drag on new and even more industry based jargon comes out. But it doesn’t end there.

In many situations when dealing with people who work in a specific field, they have specific knowledge that a layperson may not have. An example right off of this site would be something as simple as the master key system I teach new landlords about, or the process I teach for screening tenants. A new landlord wouldn’t necessarily know either of these, often even established landlords don’t!

Task, procedures or simple industry knowledge that seems natural to the person in the industry, but requires further explanation when talking to someone who is the proverbial duck out of water is where the curse of knowledge comes into play. And this curse can affect how your tenants and you get along, how profitable your property is and even how safe it can be!

You Really Just Have Different Knowledge

voodoo dollThe biggest problem with “the curse”, is you assume the other person has the same knowledge as you, which which is a gateway to misinterpretations. You believe the tenant should understand the bank requires your mortgage payment on the 1st, hence they have to pay on the first. They may think the bank will understand if the tenant suddenly had to pay support payments or an unexpected expense. Or worse yet assume you will constantly carry them!

You understand leaving windows open in the winter to cool the house down is an ineffective use of utilities (and if you as the landlord are paying them, is an added expense!). Yet to the tenant, they may just think utilities are free and it never occurs to them that it costs you extra money that takes away from potential improvements or maintenance of the property.

It’s not as if the tenants are dumb, they just don’t have your knowledge, or the curse that comes with it. With any luck your business model as a landlord isn’t based on finding tenants that aren’t as smart as you. Hopefully you are finding intelligent, thoughtful people that make your life easier, your property safer and don’t burn your property down.

You just have to remember, it’s not the matter of tenants being dumb when it comes to property versus you, it’s just that they have different knowledge. Often many of them have only been on the rental side, they don’t understand the ramifications of not paying on time, of leaving outside taps open when it’s freezing outside, or the downside of taking smoke detectors down when they go off and not informing you.

Part of your job as a successful landlord is to make sure you educate your tenants on many of these little knowledge gaps that you may have between the two of you. This is what’s called an information imbalance as Dan and Chip Heath refer to in their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (which I’d recommend you check out if you are into marketing and/or business, and yes that is an affiliate link so I get a few nickels if you purchase it through there, so thanks).

So How Do We Educate Our Tenants?

Training your tenantsThis is where the big problem shows up, because it requires more work on our part! We need to take time to educate our tenants and to create systems so we continue to do it every time.

One place to start is creating a property binder for each of your units. In the case of an up down suite, each tenant would have their own binder covering the property. Some of the information overlaps, such as where the water shut offs are for the property, location of the breaker boxes and proper use of the heating and cooling systems where applicable.

This binder stays in the property and is the ideal for putting the tenants copy of the lease, any walk throughs, local information such as shopping, restaurants, schools, post offices and banks as well. It is their go to reference and can even include manuals for stoves, fridges, and laundry machines.

Another area we can work on is explaining our leases in detail to the tenants. No glossing over the fine print. Thorough explanations of why you always need to get paid on X day is required, from there explanations of any penalties or repercussions that also accompany late payment. DO NOT LEAVE THIS VAGUE!

Next step, thorough walk throughs of the property. In one of my email tips I refer to explaining about water shut offs on toilets, taps and washing machines. Make sure you point these all out to the tenants and explain them. With external air conditioning units, maybe take a minute to explain covers need to be off when using them or that they shouldn’t block the sides.

As a landlord, you’re probably already a homeowner, so while much of this isn’t rocket science, it might as well be to someone who this is brand new too. If this is the tenants first rental unit ever ) or they have limited experience with these items), you may have to walk them through how to use the laundry, the oven or even the programmable thermostat!

By putting in the time when you sign the tenants in, you can prevent hours of frustration and possibly expensive repairs or headaches later. But by putting in this extra effort you’ll also stand out in more ways than you realize.

It’s just one of those ways you can be a standout landlord that you’re tenant will also remember and refer people to in the future!

The P.S.

The landlord tenant relationship is a two way street. As landlords and especially as long term landlords, we often forget the hardships involved with being a tenant. There is also a curse of knowledge associated that goes along with being a tenant and it may be a matter of the market changing, new rules being put into place or just our forgetfulness about what it was like being a tenant ourselves once.

While I always caution against being buddy buddy or Facebook friends with your tenant, it is important to let them know they can contact you if there are problems. you don’t want to be the landlord they fear, but rather the landlord they respect because you look after them. Previous bad experiences with bad landlords can color the perception of  tenants and this can taint the knowledge tenants have.

Bottom line, do right to your tenants and the majority of the time they will do right back to you. Now get out there and get your systems in place to break down the knowledge barrier between you and your tenants!

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.

Quick Update On Our Latest Floor Renovation

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Replacing Laminate In Our Rental

What a crazy week! As it always seems to happen, if I take a long weekend off from work, I really pay for it the next week and this last week was no exception. Oh and I lied about the quick update, go get a coffee or tea, I couldn’t stop typing…

In my previous post, I talked about upgrading some water damaged floor in one of our shared accommodation properties with a newer product our flooring guy recommended called Sobella.  Well it was installed last week and it looks great.

Before and After shots of new flooring in Rental Property

I spent all morning removing the baseboards, moving the fridge, stove and other furniture out of the way, pulling the toilet and tearing out the old vanity and then finally removing the flooring. Now I normally recommend bringing someone else in to do a bunch of this for you, but sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty.

If this is the sort of thing you like to do, here’s my rogues gallery of essential tools.

Floor Demo Tools

Various pry and crow bars to remove baseboards and lift flooring, a utility knife to cut the silicone on the tops of the baseboards (this keeps the paint from pulling away from the wall) and the handy hammer to force the pry bars and crowbars when needed.

As always seems to occur, once you start a job like this you always end up with additional problems or headaches along the way. This was no exception. After spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on reno and flip projects, here’s one rule I always employ when looking at my renovation budget.

Always count on exceeding your initial budget by 10%, and then add another 10% on top of that. Then hopefully, you end up under your budget. You never want to run out of money on a renovation, so that cushion can help protect you from unforeseen hiccups or hidden issues. And sometimes even this may leave you short!

One rental property we bought we needed to move some walls around in the semi finished basement to put a bathroom in and to finish it off properly. Part of this project involved removing the 1970’s style paneling form the outside walls. Once we removed the paneling, we discovered the homeowner had cheated and used 2 x 2’s as studs and insulated the concrete outer walls with cardboard rather than actual insulation.
Once we saw this, we were suddenly faced with rebuilding and insulating the entire basement which was the proper, yet expensive, thing to do. Needless to say, this blew the budget out of the water, but we got it done and made the property, better, warmer and a little more valuable.

We had inherited the installed laminate flooring with this property and although it looked fine in the most visible areas, in the kitchen, behind the appliances and in the bathroom I ran into some of those little issues that pop up.

First with laminate flooring, you need to let the floor float as it expands and contracts with the seasons. To allow this floating, you need to leave space against each wall allowing it to expand without buckling. If you leave too much space though, the floor can move and start to separate, which occurred in the kitchen.

Laminate flooring separating

Normally, you can use some special tools to tighten up the flooring and fix it, if you catch it early enough. But if the gaps against the walls are too loose, it will just happen over and over. Or if you tenants don’t tell you about it and food and crumbs collect in the gaps, you can’t tighten it either.

Since we were just ripping it out, this wasn’t going to be a problem, but then more problems. In the bathroom, you really want your flooring to be up tight against the toilets closet flange. The closet flange is basically where the toilet sits on the pipe and if the flooring is tight, you can easily seal it with silicone. Then if Toilet leaking under the flooringany leakage occurs, it shows up around the toilet, rather than getting caught between the flooring hidden from sight.

Guess what, yep, the flooring wasn’t tight and water had gotten underneath the laminate and on the sub floor. Fortunately it wasn’t too bad, it must have been a fairly recent leak and there was no mould, but I still had some water to deal with. So I removed the flooring, mopped up the excess water and now had to run to my storage garage to grab my huge industrial fan to start drying it out.

With water, it’s important to get the air flowing to help dry it out quickly and reduce complications like mould and ages ago we had acquired a very large industrial type fan unit that looks like a mini furnace, except it has a huge blower in it. More lost time.

Old parquet flooring under laminate

Finally, after several hours, I had all the flooring pulled and now I could see what we had to work with. This was the part the fellow who quoted us was worried about. We had a hodge podge of regular particle board sub flooring, old laminate and even parquet (yep it’s that old), all buried under the laminate.

I did have to use some filler in the bathroom where it looked like they used scrap pieces to fill in sections under the bathroom cabinet, but overall it wasn’t too bad. Since it was a new type of flooring to me though, I ended up calling the person who did the initial quotation and explained what it looked like.

He was only about 20 minutes away, so he offered to come over and take a look and once there, other than the bathroom section, thought the rest of the area the installers should be good with. So onward and upwards.

Fast forward to the next day and the installers met my wife at the property so she could explain everything to them and let them in (I had meetings that morning). Once they started, she ran off and took care of some other projects we had going on.

NEw sobella flooring installed in our rental propertyBy the time I finally arrived just before 1, they were already 90% complete. And it looked great!

We were originally told they would be able to install it as one continuous sheet, but once the installers looked at the layout they decided they would need to have one seem due to the layout.

In the after shot at the beginning of this, you can see the line of tape marking where they had to place it. With the little island that sticks out in the kitchen, it was a challenge to run the heavy section down without tearing it there.

Now that it’s installed you don’t even see the seam unless you know it’s there and the floor looks and feels great.

They ended up finishing by two (a five hour install) and this gave us another hour to make the next day’s list of projects to move this reno forward before we went to the dump with our old laminate.

As I mentioned before, that 10% add on to your budget (plus another 10%), gives you a ton of flexibility. Once we went through we decided to replace all the baseboard in the bathroom, to upgrade the fan fixture in the kitchen eating area and to do some quick painting in worn areas.

The fan and baseboards increased the cost, but we just happened to have over half of a five gallon bucket of Tequila (8672W) paint left over from another property. Since the property was originally painted this colour, it just meant some light sanding and minor touchup for prep work and good to go, but that was the next days’ project.

Onto the fun stuff. The flooring has been in for almost a week now and the tenants all seem to like it. This is in a shared accommodation property, so the guys are definitely hard on flooring and after the first week it’s holding up.

The flooring looks so much like wood that we also ran into a couple fun comments from the guys. There is a definite texture on it that imitates wood grain and one of the basement tenants who looked at it said they should have sanded the floor down a bit more (he thought it was real wood).

Another tenant who lives on the main floor noticed that the installers had forgotten to cut the floor vent out. He wanted to know if I would be back that night with a saw and drill to cut it open as he had an early morning the next day. He also thought it was real wood. I simply cut it out with a utility knife and dropped in the new vent we had for it. No drilling, so sawing, just a couple minutes work.

This type of article is definitely straying from the normal information I post. My question for you, Has it been helpful? Would you like more walk throughs of renovations projects, some of our day to day operations and other interesting parts of our lives as landlords, or should I just stick to the weekly tips and videos like I have been?

If you could take a minute or two and either leave me a comment below, or email me directly with some feedback, it would be extremely helpful and help shape what future articles look like. This project and the long weekend before have thrown my videos and posts schedule for a loop, but hopefully with the kids back in school and life on track I’ll have my next series of videos out and available over the next week.

Landlord Video Tip – What Should I Look For When Buying A Rental Property?

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Choosing Profitable Rental Properties

Choosing effective rental propertiesIn my last article, I talked about what types of properties I don’t personally like as rental properties.

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here, Do Condos Make Good Rental Properties.

In today’s article/video, I’ll be talking about my preferred types of rental properties.

Now, before you get in a huff and tell me you’ve made a ton off of condos and think they rock and that the properties I suggest don’t work in your area, remember, this is based off my experience.

For some people you may have had other experiences, and if you are only looking at one or two properties, maybe that works perfectly for you. I applaud that you are successfully running a landlord business and your property works.

In the long run though, if you’re looking at expanding your landlord business, want to increase your monthly cash flow and create your own little mini Real Estate empire, you might want to watch this next video.

In it I will explain why I think the properties I like make the best rental properties for people looking to either get into the business or to expand their portfolio.

I look forward to your feedback, so leave me a comment and tell me your thoughts!

Landlord Video Tip – Do Condo Make Good Rental Properties?

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Condos As Rentals

Do condos make good rentals?When I first started in the landlord business a decade ago, we started looking at condos to use for rental properties. They were cheaper than single family homes, they were low maintenance as I didn’t have to deal with snow, lawn or building maintenance and they were in high demand as rents were a bit lower than renting a house. Also many buildings offered rental pools making my job even easier.

Fast forward a few years and I had a few more insights into the positives and negatives of condominiums as rental properties. That’s where today’s video comes in.

If you’ve just started reading the Educated Landlord, this video is off my normal beaten track. Typically my articles revolve around being a landlord, but recently people have been indicating they’re considering picking up additional properties.

I’ve been there, I’ve made some mistakes and I’ve made some great decisions. So rather than you finding out about the mistake part on your own, I’ve created a few videos addressing what to look for with picking up another property and what to watch out for.

But don’t worry, I still have plenty of additional landlord tips coming too, so watch for them as well. So check out the video below and don’t forget to share it with other landlord or potential landlord friends!

Did the video help? Did it give you a different perspective on using condos as rentals? And would you like more videos along this vein?

As always, leave me a comment if you have one (or can make one up). Let me know if you find the videos helpful, or what else you want to know about and I will do my best to get more info out to you!

Also, if you were paying attention, I’m just about ready to release my new E-course on screening tenants. It’s a short five day course that will prepare you for screening your first or your fiftieth tenant and it’s going to be absolutely FREE!!!

My “beta” reviewers have already been giving some hugely positive feedback and I’m pretty excited to hear form everyone once it’s live. If you’re not currently registered on the site, please take a moment and register on the bottom of this page with your name and email so you can be among the first to find out when it’s released.

Thanks for joining us here at The Educated Landlord. FYI, the picture at the beginning is the building where we bought our first condo(s) back in 2004 and this was one of our advertising photos when we rented them out. And that is why you turn the date stamp off on your advertising photos!

Landlord Video Tip – Saving Time With Future Ads

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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!