Episode 17: Maintaining Work-Life Balance for Rental Property Owners

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This episode veers off the “how to” path and takes a look at the challenges we face as rental property owners. 

Sometimes being a landlord is not easy.  Often there are a lot of demands from your tenants, or your home, or a 9-5 job, or the needs of family and friends.  Likely, all the demands seem to come at once! 

We all want to be able to be there and “do it all” but is that what’s best for us and for our loved ones?

We don’t get specific as to exactly what you need to do to find peace; Only YOU can do that.  Instead, we discuss challenges we have faced and suggest 4 steps that we are consistently referring back to for us to minimize the overwhelm.

Give it a listen and let us know your thoughts on the subject matter.

LINKS:

Our Top 5 Prescreening Questions we always ask and why we ask them!

Last year we added prescreening questions to our tenant evaluation policy.

Why? Because we got tired of getting excited about meeting a potential applicant, only to find out they did not qualify to rent our unit.

Yes, the criteria are listed in our ad copy, but 75% of potential applicants skip right over it.

Better to come right out and ask if they qualify before you set up a meeting. It’s a waste of our time and theirs to not be upfront about our criteria.

We have a list of specific questions we ask each prospective tenant prior to even meeting them in person.  This saves time and time is money.

Grab our FREE Download today!

WE LOVE INSTACART! 

There are weeks we just have to hand grocery shopping duties off to others and using Instacart has been a game changer for us!

Sure, there’s a minimal cost for the service, but the time saved and then used on more important tasks is priceless.

We use them for delivery of groceries, last minute gifts, and to deliver goods to family members in need… think college kids who aren’t feeling well or aging parents who can’t get to the store themselves.

Some stores we love to have them shop at for us are Costco, Target, Walmart, CVS/Walgreens, BevMo or Total Wines 😉, ALL our local grocery stores, and even Lowes!

We have a $30 coupon if you want to give it a try!

Just click this link or enter code: SCASELLA1161F4 at checkout!

TurboTenant is a great option for landlords with just a few doors or for those who may be new to using rental property software. 

For the most part, TurboTenant’s software is free to use so they are perfect for those on a tight budget.

With a very minimal monthly fee, landlords can upgrade to have such items as all landlord forms, leases, and addendums included as well as accelerated marketing, rent deposits, and customer service assistance on TurboTenant.

Hemlane is a software that is built to grow with your needs as a landlord.

For a minimal amount, you get a really good basic package but what we love is that you can upgrade to add 24/7 maintenance management on to your package.  Your tenants then have a contact number to reach out to and Hemlane will then contact YOUR maintenance people specified and get the job done.

It gets better!  If you reach a place where you are ready to hand off management to a property manager, Hemlane has that too under their “Complete” option.

Doorloop is relatively new to the landlord software space but they are global and can handle any property in any country and with any currency.

Where their features are similar to the others, from a tech standpoint, Doorloop is top notch.

It’s extremely modern and intuitive.

There are help pop-ups all through the dashboard if needed, it’s fully customizable, there are reporting templates, and they are optimized for mobile devices and tablets. 

Doorloop has thousands of apps which can be integrated with their software like google docs, accounting software, etc. so that you don’t have to perform double entries.  One of them being Quickbooks which was a huge plus for us!

Quickbooks is our go to software for accounting and bookkeeping.  Using QuickBooks allows us to do a deeper dive into analysis and evaluate income and expenses. 

We can segment these income and expenses by property and even down to the unit which is really nice OR we can see an overall picture of how we are doing with all properties combined.

We especially like that Quickbooks has a mobile app for us to accept payments on the go.  This makes taking in person application fees and security deposits VERY convenient.

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