Greetings friends! I have to apologize for my rather sporadic posting schedule over the last few weeks. Not only am I a new momma (Baby CMF is coming up on 3 months old!), but my own mother recently had surgery and moved in with us for a while as she recuperates. She is much better now and has recently moved back into her own home, which is great for her. AND it frees me up to get back into writing more!!
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Back to Work!
So anyway, back to regularly scheduled programming. 🙂 As I’ve written about in the past, the hubs and I have a couple single family rental homes, one of which is located about five hours away from where we currently live. We LOVE that little house and we’ve had tenants in it from practically the day we closed on the property, as it is recently remodeled and in a desirable part of town.
However, one day at the beginning of August this summer we received word from our property manager that the tenants hadn’t paid the rent. She went to the house to investigate, and it was pretty much empty. As in, they had apparently decided to move out and hadn’t bothered to give us any notice.
And More
Unfortunately that was not the only thing they had not bothered to do. They hadn’t bothered to clean ANYTHING. For three years. You ever wonder what it would look like if you didn’t clean your house for three years? I know. And it ain’t pretty.
The timing of this could not have been worse. Our property manager, who is also a realtor and a long-time friend of mine, had a very sad summer. Her daughter passed away in July this year, and then, just a few days after she notified us that our tenants moved out, her husband (our handyman) passed away as well. Obviously we told her NOT to worry about the house; getting it back to ready-to-rent status was just not as important as taking care of her husband’s final arrangements and taking care of herself.
But we had a six week-old baby at the time, so we also had our hands pretty full right about then. My hubby is working full time. There was no way I could get out there to clean the property unless the hubs came along so we could tag team on parent duties.
Dirty and Empty
So our little house sat, dirty and empty, for a few weeks this summer. When she returned from her husband’s funeral, our property manager arranged for someone to paint the interior of the house and take care of a few things that needed repair (a hole in a wall from a doorknob, a small crack in a ceiling, etc.). We could have easily done the painting ourselves, but we knew we had all the cleaning to do and we knew the cleaning alone would take a few days and Mr. CMF didn’t have that much time off work. This was really the first time in three years that living so far away from our rental property became an issue for us.
Filth City
Finally last weekend, after dropping my mother back at her home and getting her settled in there, we managed to get out to the rental house. It was dirtier than we could have imagined! We knew the tenants were smokers, but every time we had visited the property in the last three years it did not smell that bad.
But when we arrived this time it smelled horrible. I never knew that if you smoke inside it leaves a residue on the walls and windows- but trust me, it does! I probably used half a roll of paper towels wiping down the counter until it was clean enough that I felt comfortable putting my purse down. One of the tenants’ daughters had drawn all over the shower walls with either paint or crayon. I spent three hours in the shower the first night we were there, scrubbing like crazy.
Crap Left Behind
Almost worse than the filth was the items left behind. For some reason they had left a box spring to a bed in the basement. When we tried to remove it, we figured out why it was there- it was too big to get out! We have no idea how they got it down there in the first place, but it was clearly not going to come out without help. So hubby broke it up with a hammer (the most menacing tool we had brought with us), and we rolled it up and tied it with coaxial cable that had also been left behind.
Other items left behind were three huge speakers, a TV stand, a patio umbrella, a huge roll of carpet padding in the backyard (an utter mystery, since there was no carpeting installed in the home while they lived there), and a car jack in the front yard.
Irony or Irresponsibility?
But none of these things were what annoyed me most. What annoyed me most was the fact that the overhead light fixture in one of the bedrooms was obviously broken. They had never bothered to let us know that it needed to be replaced. WHY did this particular thing bother me so much? Because one of our esteemed ex-tenants was an electrician. If he had given us a heads up on that we would happily have given them a break on the rent in exchange for fixing it. Instead we have to hire an electrician to replace it now. Grrr.
Ironically, we and our property manager had visited the property multiple times while those tenants were living there. I had always thought they were taking pretty good care of the place. But I realize now that I had never bothered to look very closely at things like the windows, and I can’t remember how closely I inspected the shower walls.
All in all, it took Mr. CMF and me a solid two days of work (spread over three days) to get the place clean. Ugh!
In case anyone is wondering, we totally kept their entire deposit.
We ARE planning to move closer to the property, and hopefully sooner rather than later (we are just waiting for a job to open up for Mr. CMF!) Living closer to the property would have been uber helpful this summer, as we could have gotten around to cleaning it much faster and spaced it out over more days.
The Moral of this Landlord Story
Anyway, the upshot of this post is that being a landlord can be an awfully dirty job- you cannot be afraid to get your hands dirty and possibly clean up other peoples’ messes. Hopefully you will never have to do that, but it’s certainly a possibility. Despite our recent experience, we still like rental properties as a source of passive income.
Do you have any rental properties? If so, have you ever had a tenant who moved out and left the place a mess? If you do not have any rental properties, do you think you’d like to some day? Why or why not?
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Something similar happened to me before. One of our tenants asked to sit down and talk with us before he moved out. We showed up at the house and – oh my god- it was in awful shape. The carpet (which was new when they moved in) looked like someone poured motor oil all over it. There were holes in nearly every wall. All of the interior doors in the house were missing….gone. They had broken the front picture window somehow and haphazardly tried to replace it with a window that didn’t match the rest of the house. The list goes on and on..
Apparently his wife had left 6 months earlier and it had all gone downhill from there. It was really strange to me though- I had been in the house 9 months before and it looked fine- not great, but fine.
We kept their deposit and prepared to sue them in small claims for the rest (they left over $6,000 worth of damage). But they didn’t want to go to court so we settled on a repayment schedule instead. They repaid most of it over the next 18 months to avoid going to court.
Oh, I forgot to mention the carpet! Luckily there is only carpet in the basement, but it looks like someone died on it. It’s PROBABLY cola stains, not blood, but that gives you some idea of the level of filth. Our PM apparently knows a carpet stain removal magician, so we’ll see what it looks like after that.
Wow this sounds like a horror story. My uncle had renters who smoked and when they moved out it was a mess. There was this nasty residue all over the house that it took forever to clean… so I know what you mean.
Hopefully you’ll get better tenants next time.
We hope so too!!
We have a rental in another state, we have not had as large of a cleaning issue as that with a tenant, but something more mild. It is definitely a fear in owning a rental further away. My initial reaction was to blame your PM and I still might actually. I think it’s great practice to give a walk through every 3-6 months, especially with out of area properties.
I’m a big proponent of real estate for passive income/FI, our plan currently is to use 75-80% of this income, I would like to get that number more diversified though.
I think our PM is probably at least partially to blame, but I’m finding it hard to blame her since both her daughter and her husband died this summer. Most days when I talk to her I’m amazed at how well she is doing and the fact that she is doing as much as she is. I think I’d still be a puddle if I lost the two most important people in my life within two months.
Now, see, this is why I’m hesitant about wanting to get a rental house as a side income plan. People who rent don’t tend to look after a place as well as they would if was their own. Also, damage – how to cope with that? Good to hear you kept all of their deposit, too right!
True story- people totally don’t look after a rental as they would a place that they owned. At this point we are grateful that most of the things that needed to be repaired were probably not things that they caused (except one hole in the wall from a doorknob)- they were things that would have happened eventually anyway (like the crack in the ceiling). It was just a nightmare to clean the place when they had apparently not cleaned at all since the day they moved in!! That combined with the fact that they left a ton of crap behind caused us the most issues.
I’ve been renting out my house for about a year and a half. It’s an older woman that lives there and she has been great. Unfortunately, she has had some medical issues and now can’t afford the rent and is breaking the lease/moving out. It stinks because she ha been a great tenant. I’m hoping that what I find when she moves out is nowhere near what you have found.
BUMMER about losing a good tenant! Good tenants are hard to find 🙂 I hope you have good luck finding the next one!
Every time I think I *might* want to be a landlord someday, I read these stories and get a little scared! I don’t understand how people can be so careless and ungrateful as to ruin the place they live in. Just because I rent doesn’t mean I get to destroy everything. Who would want to live like that?! Fingers crossed a job opens up for Mr. CMF so you guys can move! Hopefully you’ll get better tenants this time around.
Well, they didn’t really destroy anything, but they clearly put very little effort into cleaning or maintaining the place! We have been spending some time recently brainstorming what we can do better in the future so that this type of thing does not happen again- although sadly I think it really comes down to what type of people we get as tenants.
I’m so sorry to hear that! It’s just awful! You’ve had your fair share of hassles this summer with your flood and now this. Good thing you have baby joy sprinkled in there! 🙂
We’ve definitely had our fair share of expenses this summer! Overall the baby joy has overshadowed all of it though 🙂 We feel so blessed, despite the crappy tenants and the flood, etc.
Oh, dear. Sorry to hear that your rental was left in such a state. Hope you are able to sort it out soon. As to being a ‘dirty job’ a Scottish friend just told me that they have a saying ‘the work is dirty but the money is clean’. (Just trying to cheer you up, really.)
Ha! I love that saying! Sounds like your Scottish friend knows what’s up (good thing they decided to stick with UK, right??)
My sister in law was 2 apartments for rent. Every time the tenants leave it’s mayhem. I can’t imagine how dirty and reckless people can be when it’s not their property.
It really can be crazy. Our last two tenants were guys in their twenties. I’m hoping the new tenants (two older ladies who are sisters) will at least clean up after themselves better! You never know, though.
We went to view a house for sale (well a couple) and they looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in several years. The windows were covered in thick black mouldy condensation, it would have come off with a damp cloth! If you are trying to sell the house, at least clean the house.
Next door to us is a rental. They have a dog. That dog doesn’t leave the house, sometimes they are gone for over 12hrs while doggy is locked inside. Only one place he can go to the toilet so guessing the inside of their place doesn’t smell to great (I have heard shouts to her kids of don’t go in xx the dog has shat in there) songuessing her landlord will be in for an unpleasant surprise if she ever leaves.
Oh my gosh, both of those situations sound deplorable. Being a landlord is definitely not for the faint of heart!