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Cutting The Cost of Repairs

Stay Out of the Repair Business

One of the worst things that a full-time Canadian real estate investor despises is getting calls from tenants for some small insignificant thing in your unit that needs fixing.

There are ways to be able to alleviate this and have the tenant want to be responsible for small insignificant repairs and never bother you with them, thus keeping your maintenance to zero. Is this possible?

Three key Strategies

In our investor trainings we discuss implementing 3 key strategies:

1. We sell our appliances to the tenants as soon as they move in. Yes. And when they move out, as long as they are in clean and good working order, I will buy them back from them for $250, or $300, or even $500 more than what you paid me. This is obviously dependent on the length of their stay, and you can make it a graduated scale: if they stay one year, we will give you 50 more, two years 100, three years 150, etc. So who is going to fix the appliance when it breaks down during the time of their stay? Obviously they are, since it is not even your appliance anymore.

2. Make sure you give them a repair request sheet, in fact a full stack of them when they move in. This repair request sheet states the date, and the description of the repair. In doing this, you are creating a paper trail with dates and signatures, and obviously the description of the requests. Now as a landlord, we want to get to these requests in good time. Why? Because the main reason that the people move out is because the landlord doesn’t to the repairs that are requested. So very important that you do the repairs. You can even say to the tenant, or give it in writing, that if you don’t do the repairs within one week of the repair request being submitted, that you will actually refund that tenant the daily amount of their rent up until the time that the repair is completed. Is that fair? I think that is a very fair solution, and that gives you lots of respect in the eyes of the tenant.

3. You can tell them that if they take their repairs upon themselves, that you will give them $100 at the end of the year. Now, you have to be cognizant of who you are offering this to, and perhaps you need some history before offering this to someone, because they can abuse this and not fix something ever, and have badly needed repairs in the unit and they just don’t say anything. So to make this happen, you have to trust the tenant, but even that being said, it is very important that you inspect the unit on a regular basis, making sure indeed that no repairs are needed.

Implement these three strategies, and you will have very, very few repair issues, and you may even keep your maintenance to zero.

Canadian Wealth Builders offers an intensive 2 day Successful Landlording training which involves management and purchasing of small multi-units to apartment buildings.