So my tenants just moved in to one of my units and it was a disaster.
In this video, I'm going to explain to you what happened, what I did to resolve it
and in the future, what I'm going to do to prevent this from happening again.
So my tenant was going to be moving in and I'm a small landlord
and I manage four properties basically on my own.
The issue that I've never had before is in this situation
I was going to be out of town and the person that helps me manage
was also going to be out of town since I was going to be
using the same handyman and cleaning service that I normally use.
I was thinking this was going to be no big deal.
All I had to do was get the handyman in there to fix a few things,
get the maids in there
to make it sparkling, and get the painters and their to paint super easy, right?
Oh, how wrong. Some of us knew landlords can be.
So let's start with the first thing that went wrong.
The first thing that went wrong was before the tenant even moved in.
It was the week of the move in.
I had some painters over to paint the unit.
I was the last one in the unit a few days prior and everything was fine.
The painters were supposed to arrive at 8 a.m..
I get a call at 9 a.m.
after they had been there for one hour stating that there is a window
broken from the inside, but it was not them.
So I ended up having to have a window company come out in an emergency
and repair and replace a window which was $400.
So the first lesson for me was you can't just have contractors
in your unit without you being there, because if you do,
you have to accept those consequences if something goes wrong,
because there's no way to prove that, you know, they didn't break the window.
However, the painting was done.
So now all I had to do was have a handyman come in and fix a few things,
and the maid's come in and make the place sparkle.
And it would be good to go for my tenant.
So now we get to move in day.
I'm thinking I have this in the bag.
I've had so many people in there to fix everything.
The paint looks good and I'm assuming that the place is just sparkling.
Well, not so fast.
So I get a call from my tenant upon move in.
The place is not clean.
Him and his mom had taken, you know, a napkin and put it on the floor
and there was dust and dirt all over the napkin
and there was purple shampoo in the bathtub from the last tenant.
And all I could think is how could this possibly happen?
My maids are always, always, always awesome.
I use them for all my projects.
I call my cleaning lady and I'm honestly shocked.
Well, then she informs me that she was unable to make the job,
so she sent her sister in to clean because she had to take her mom
to a doctor's appointment.
So this is something that if I would have been there,
I would have realized the place wasn't clean.
But since I just trusted my contract, there's, you know, it wasn't clean.
And then this is obviously a really bad first impression with my tenant.
So I scheduled for them to come back out
and do some cleaning the next day to kind of remedy the situation.
When I get another text from my tenant saying that underneath the kitchen sink,
when he turns it on, water is squirting everywhere air
because the hose underneath the sink wasn't properly attached.
At this point, Ken and I are driving back from California and I want to cry.
Like, honestly, I'm like, this is seriously the worst move in ever.
I don't know why nobody,
you know, checked the saying, I don't know why anybody didn't clean the place.
But really, the fault lies with me because I didn't have anyone look at it.
You cannot just blindly trust contractors.
And this was a big lesson for me.
Luckily, my tenant is very handy and he ran the Home Depot
and got some stuff to bind the hose to the sink and made it work.
So now I have a tenant that moved into a dirty unit, had to get cleaners over there
the next day after they moved in and had to repair
a sink and clean up water from where it squirted everywhere.
Upon moving to what's supposed to be this nice unit, they're moving into.
This is a really bad first impression.
And it was a Friday that all this happened.
And I had scheduled to walk through the unit with him
and his mom, who's also living there, and his girlfriend.
Did, you know, kind of walk through
and do the move and move out checklist on Sunday.
So I'm super nervous to go over there on Sunday and kind of face my tenants.
And, you know, I want them to know that I'm a good landlord,
but I also feel really bad for what happened.
So I was trying to think in my head what I was going to say to them.
You know, I had to say something.
I can't think that this just happens and I'm okay with it.
And what I realized is I just have to tell them the truth.
I just have to tell them I was on vacation.
I trusted my contractors.
I shouldn't have and I should have had somebody walk through it with that.
I shouldn't have I should have had somebody walk
through the unit and double check their work. But I didn't.
I let my tenants know
I've used all these contractors before and I had never had an issue.
But I realized I cannot do this again without oversight.
But I let them know that this was totally unacceptable.
And I apologized this completely defuze the situation.
And by the end we were all smiling and laughing and joking around about it.
I think they just appreciated that.
I admitted that I was a small landlord and I also admitted that I made a mistake.
Honesty with your tenants is always the best policy.
Nobody wants to hear about some random excuse that you have to make.
You just have to come clean with everything.
So what did I learn?
I learned this can't happen again.
And you can't trust other people without verifying their work,
no matter how many times you've used them.
This is my sole responsibility as a landlord and I just didn't do it.
And that's unacceptable.
And also, this cost me a lot of money.
I had to pay $400 for a broken window
and I had to pay for the maids to come back out and clean again.
And lastly, if my tenant wasn't so handy, I would have had to have a handyman
come out and repair the sink.
So that was about a $600 cost to me as a small landlord.
And as you said, all landlords know that's a lot of money.
This could have all been avoided
if I had somebody there to manage the property when I wasn't there.
And I normally do have somebody, but like I had told you, she was out of town.
But that's not acceptable either.
I have to have a third backup.
If there's a situation where we're both out of town,
somebody has to be managing the move and somebody has to be managing your tenants.
And if you are somebody that is out of state
or is thinking about purchasing a property out of state, just understand
all of these things can happen to you because I basically was an out of
state landlord
for this move, and though it does make things more challenging, don't do it.
I do.
And make sure that you're on top of your tenants and your move ins moving forward.