Eviction is the process of removing a tenant from a rental property. In most cases, it is a long, stressful, and expensive process that most rental property owners prefer never to deal with.
What if you never had to deal with an eviction or hire an eviction lawyer? While our Sarasota property management experts can’t guarantee that you’ll never go through the eviction process with a renter, finding ways to keep your tenants happy can help avoid bad situations that require removing a resident/ Here are our best tips for eviction prevention!
Fulfill Your Responsibilities As Excellent Rental Property Owner
The lease agreement outlines the responsibilities for property owners and tenants during the lease term. One of the ways to keep your tenants happy and avoid eviction is to fulfill your duties as an excellent property owner. If you’re not sure what those responsibilities are, a property manager recommends fine-tuning your operations in these areas to reduce the potential for evictions!
Deliver Excellent Maintenance Services
Delivering excellent maintenance services helps renters feel at home and appreciate the quality housing you provide. Unfortunately, many renters leave properties (or withhold rental payments) due to terrible maintenance services and a lack of responsiveness to critical requests.
A property manager can recommend these tips to improve maintenance services for happier tenants, including:
- Prioritize maintenance requests. When receiving maintenance requests, property owners must prioritize emergencies first. While all requests should be reviewed right away, a non-emergent situation doesn’t require immediate action. In general, document every request, take care of emergencies right away, and let renters know your timeframe for handling something that isn’t an emergency.
- Always respond to maintenance requests. Renters need to know you received their request, even if it’s not an emergency. A property manager can help you set up an online system to receive and track requests. This can help ensure that all requests get to you while providing an easy way to respond to residents right away.
- Conduct preventive maintenance. Property managers can tell you that it’s always better to prevent a problem than wait for something to break! Create a preventative maintenance schedule to keep rental properties in excellent condition year-round.
Conducting routine maintenance not only keeps your tenants happy but will also keep your investment property in the best shape possible to increase value and returns!
Communicate Proactively
Good communication with tenants helps encourage them to pay rent on time and report maintenance problems right away. Staying in touch with residents also helps build good relationships that can help diffuse conflicts when renters have a complaint. Early and prompt communication can prevent many problems and lease violations that could lead to an eviction lawsuit.
Avoid Raising the Rent Significantly
A sudden increase in the rent amount can discourage renters and create a problematic situation. This does not mean that you cannot increase rent at all to maintain returns. However, property owners should be mindful of significant rate increases and the impact they can have on renters. Most tenants expect a slight rate increase when renewing the lease. However, jumping the rate up too high too soon—or attempting to raise the rent mid-lease—can lead to unhappy tenants who refuse to pay rent at all.
Keep Rentals In Excellent Condition
Keeping rentals safe and livable is one of the primary responsibilities of a landlord. We mentioned proactive maintenance and responding quickly to maintenance requests, which are two critical elements to providing well-maintained properties. In addition, property owners should conduct routine property inspections to look for potential problems before they become significant issues that could lead to unhappy tenants. A property owner should also consider smart updates to deliver amenities that renters want in a home and keep the property in demand.
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