Real estate is a people business and one of the biggest difficulties of being a landlord is maintaining a positive relationship with your tenants. Business often requires making tough decisions, but it’s important to understand that those decisions also impact people’s lives. To be a successful landlord like Steven Taylor Taylor Equities you need to be able to balance looking out for your bottom line with having empathy for the lives of your tenants. Here are a few tips to maintain positive relationships with your tenants.
Give Advanced Notice of Any Major Changes or Disruptions: Just like you’d expect any business associate to value your time, you should show the same courtesy to your tenants. Ultimately, the tenant-landlord relationship is a business relationship, although it may not always seem that way. Therefore, it’s good practice to alert tenants to any changes or disruptions to their lives ahead of time, so they can adjust accordingly. Let them know if you plan on raising the rent, selling the building, changing the ownership structure of the units, or doing any major renovations that may cause noise or block entry to the building. How much prior notice you give depends on the situation. But be aware that these changes may affect their living situation and you should allow enough time for them to adjust or make new plans if you want to maintain a healthy relationship.
Provide a Line of Communication: No one likes an absentee slumlord who won’t pick up the phone when you have an emergency. One of your responsibilities as a landlord is making sure the property is habitable for your tenants and you have a duty to make yourself reachable in the event that something goes wrong. This doesn’t mean you have to give every tenant your personal cell number or you should entertain frivolous requests. But you should provide a reliable way for tenants to contact you or your staff to request repairs or other necessary improvements to your units.
Respond to Issues Promptly: Going along with communication, you should always make sure to respond to any serious complaints as quickly as possible. It doesn’t make a difference if tenants can contact you if you don’t respond to their requests in a timely fashion. You should have a network of professionals or a team of employees on standby to deal with any potential issues. Leaving your tenants stranded for days or weeks at a time, especially when it’s a serious issue, will cause resentments to build and will damage your relationship.
Maintaining positive relationships with your tenants will make your life much easier as a landlord. This doesn’t mean you have to be best friends. But having a solid working relationship with your tenants will make your life much easier. For example, Stephen Taylor Taylor Equities has done over $500 million in real estate transactions in the Southern California real estate market and these are the strategies that have made him so successful in real estate.