Main Content

Turning Stinky Tenants Into Lemonade

We’ve all heard the phrase turning lemons into lemonade. Here’s a story of how I’m turning stinky tenants into lemonade.

This evening, a prospective tenant just applied on my online portal interest in one of my vacant properties. The property is a suburban house where the old tenant moved out last week, leaving it in good condition. Considering that I already have a prospect who claims to make enough money and want to move quickly, I should be happy, right?

Lucky for me and for my clients, we manage a lot of properties in the area. Over time, we got to know a lot of people in the area including this prospective tenant. I shouldn’t really call them a prospective tenant, because they’re already an existing tenant of mine renting a different property owned by a different owner which is problem #1.

This leads to problem #2. If the tenant is leaving, the property will be vacant soon. From the way it sounds, it seems like the tenant wants to move soon.

Before we start thinking about moving this tenant into the new property, we need to consider problem #3. This tenant has been there long before we started managing their property and they’re behind in their rent. Since they’ve been there for so long, the owner wanted us to be patient with the tenant.

Here’s where they lemonade comes in. Lemonade #1: Since we do a lot of property management in this area we’re going avoid putting this questionable tenant into a new property. According to her application, she has good income and good credit. There is no way any landlord could know that they’re behind in rent other than me.

Lemonade #2: Since we now know that she has been saving money for 1st, last & security somewhere else, we can press her much harder for better payment. If we immediately start eviction, she will probably pay, because an eviction will decrease the chances of her being able to get a new rental.

The moral of the story is that a competent property manager that has experience in the area will be able to avoid problems and come up with solutions that it would be impossible for a landlord to do on their own.