1.2. TAKING OVER AS THE NEW OWNER

1.2. TAKING OVER AS THE NEW OWNER

As you delve into this book, you will notice that one of the key points of my system revolves around the fact that YOU are not the OWNER, but instead are just a lowly PROPERTY MANAGER, with little or no authority to make decisions or change anything, including the lease documents.

This system works best if the prospective tenant is introduced to it before they move in, and we will show you how to accomplish just that.

But you may be facing another problem:  When you acquire a property where there is already an existing tenant, how do you change them over to my system?  Know that it is always more difficult to move an existing tenant onto my system than it is to train them from the beginning. 

Here are some thoughts:

1.  Depending on how lenient the past landlord has been, forcing the existing tenant to migrate to the KILLER LEASE may be simply impossible. 

Let’s say the existing tenant has been there 2 years, pays the rent about half the time, always has an excuse about why they can’t pay and what repairs need to be done and they have even successfully performed their own unauthorized repairs and deducted the expense from the rent.

They may never have had more than a handshake agreement with the landlord, who identified herself as the owner.  That owner never enforced any late fees or even made the tenant pay rent when they didn’t want to do so.

In a case like this, it will likely NOT be possible to move the tenant over to the new highly regimented system.  Once you have recognized this, you’ll need to make a decision:

Is the existing tenant worth fooling around with, or is it time to kick this one out and get a new one that you can train from the start?

Only YOU can make this decision, but here is my two cents:  

A]  A tenant in place is valuable.  The cost of a turnover is likely to be several thousand dollars and it may be worth trying to live with the existing tenant for a while, even if they are not willing to get with the new program.  

On the other hand

B] unless you truly need to keep this tenant (perhaps due to financial pressures or a terrible rental market), my experience is that I am usually better off making a clean sweep. Tenants who have lived in a property under a lenient (or incompetent) landlord or even an absentee landlord tend to be difficult to handle, partly because they have got it in their heads that they can get away with ignoring the rules because they have in the past.