What’s the most important thing to do when you’re a landlord? Pay attention when you don’t have to. It’s easy to pay attention when they’re calling you with problems, trashing the place or not paying the rent. In fact it gets to the point that you don’t want to pay attention, you get tired of paying attention. So when nothing is going on, you let your rental properties slip out of your consciousness.
Pay attention when there’s nothing in your face to pay attention to? Not a chance.
The most successful landlords, the ones who own a bazillion properties and make the big bucks, got that way because they paid attention at times when their investments didn’t demand it. One way they did that is to create a climate where their properties were not demanding attention.
When they hear of a landlord having lots of problems, reacting instead of acting, they scratch their heads in puzzlement. They consider situations where tenants are calling, trashing a property and not paying the rent as a small speed bump. They simply handle the issue by disposing of non-paying or destructive tenants and/or taking care of the problem the tenant calls about. Then they get on with their primary reason for being in the rental property business–making money.
Buying rental property and being successful at it are two different things. Of course to be successful at it you have to own some. But lots of landlords hang on by their fingernails for dear life hoping things will get better, while tenants take advantage of them. Of course things never do get better. Why? because these landlords violated one or both of the first two rules of landlording.
The first rule is to write down what you want and when you’ll get it. What do you want to happen with your rental property? When do you want that to happen? This rule is the one that the most successful investment property owners follow to the letter. When they buy investment property they know the kind of property they want, how much it will net them (both in income and when it is sold), the condition they require it to be in and when they are going to sell it.
The second rule is to figure out how you are going to accomplish those goals. They have strategies and tactics all worked out. None of those include getting sidetracked by bad tenants and problems. What they do include is not having bad tenants to start with, but rather only tenants who pass the muster of the strict requirements these landlords have for who gets to live in their properties. They also include planning proper care and maintenance of their investments so they don’t get as many unexpected, unwelcome calls.
If they do get a call, they have a system worked out to take care of problems pronto. Then they don’t have to think about it any more. They worked hard to own their properties; no way a bad tenant or unexpected challenge is going to interfere with their plans.
So you want to be successful in the rental property business? Do the most important thing you can do: pay attention to your investments when you don’t have to. Make plans for how you are going to take care of the properties you have and where you are going to invest in the future.
Do that and, yes, occasionally you might get a phone call and might even still have a tenant who doesn’t pay the rent, but it will just be a tiny speed bump on your road to financial success.
