Tag Archives: landlord

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The Prius. I’m sure you’re feeling very smug and superior about the gas you’re saving, Mr. Prius Driver, as you tool along at 40 miles an hour on a major commuter artery. What you really need to do though is either a) Buy a car that can actually keep up with the flow of traffic; b) Leave at a time other than when 10,000 people are trying to get home for the evening; c) Die in a horrible, fiery crash. It doesn’t make any difference at all to me which option you decide to exercise.

2. The election. I love politics, but can we seriously just shut up and vote already. Is there really anyone out there that hasn’t already made up their mind about who they’ll vote for in November. Admit it, the presidential election is the big draw. We’re no more likely to know more about the down-ticket candidates in November than we do now anyway. It’s ok, I’m not going to judge you for not knowing jack about the candidates for county commissioner, judge, or dog catcher. Let’s just save the time, effort, and hours of blathering on television and get on with it already. A hot mess now, a hot mess later, either way it’s going to be a hot mess. I’d rather just get it out of the way sooner rather than later.

3. In what universe does it take 14 hours to respond to an email that requires a simple yes or no answer. I’m not asking anyone to transcribe A Tale of Two Cities with their thumbs, just type in a two or three letter response and hit send. I know the Blackberry you’re carrying is an arcane bit of technology, but if memory serves, it’s pretty good at receiving and sending email, so unclench you sphincter, remove your head from your rectum, and keep up.

4. Being a Landlord. If there’s anything that sucks more than being a renter, it’s being a landlord. It’s even worse when you’re a landlord by proxy because that means you have to make decisions on the fly based on grainy pictures and not much information. Don’t believe me? Let me know how you feel when your property manager tells you that you need to spend 1/75th the “post correction” value of the house you’re already losing money on every month to fix the driveway because the slab is cracked and sinking at odd angles. I should have just asked him how much it would cost to hire an arsonist

The rites of spring…

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It’s the time of year again. The neighborhood is full of whirring lawnmowers (except the house behind mine of course), the plants are blooming, and everyone seems more or less ready to get on with the warm weather. Being completely anal retentive, I’ve been planning for this moment for the last two months. The lawn equipment has had its oil changed, blades sharpened, and a supply of premium fuel laid on. Spring isn’t so much about enjoying nature as bringing it to heel after it’s months long free for all during the cold season.

Since it’s been nice enough to live with the windows open in the evening, I haven’t started fiddling with bringing the air conditioners back to life… that was until I started to “un-winterize” the a/c unit the cools the entire downstairs. When I wrapped things up for the winter, I was pretty confident that I had killed off the mold that had been growing inside the unit. Sadly, I was wrong. This wasn’t a new fight, of course. I had waged holy war on this mold almost since the day I moved in, kicked on the air, and wondered “what’s that God-awful smell?” But I thought I had finally struck on the right combination of vinegar, bleach, and random HVAC cleaning supplies from Home Depot to set things right. As I mentioned before, yeah, I was most definitely wrong.

To help set the stage, you need to know that this is the single biggest window-mounted air conditioner that I have every personally seen. It’s so large that it’s actually permanently bolted and caulked into the window. Sure, technically it’s a window unit, but it’s basically like having a central air condenser bolted directly to the window. Seriously. It’s big. If I had to bet, I’d guess it’s 300 pounds easy. And that’s really where the problem starts.

You see, every website on earth tells you that to properly clean mold out of a window air conditioner, the first thing to do is take the unit out of the window and remove the metal housing so you can access the interior spaces where the nastiness is building up. Since this beast is bolted to the house, something tells me these particular directions are not going to apply. Even if I could do any of that without demolishing the window itself, there’s not a chance that I could pull it off as a one man job, which brings us to my point… It’s time for yet another awkward conversation with the landlord about appliances and the need for regular preventative maintenance.

I foresee our talk going something like this:

Me: The air conditioner in the living room is full of mold.

Landlord: Did you clean it?

Me: *rolls eyes* Of course. The mold is inside the housing. It needs to be disassembled and cleaned properly.

Landlord: You can’t do that?

Me: No.

Landlord: That’s going to be expensive.

Me: Probably, but less expensive than me buying a new air conditioner for the living room and deducting it from next month’s rent.

Landlord: %$#*

Me: *smirk*

That conversation should be taking place any time now. It happens less and less often these days, but it’s one of those friendly reminders that living in someone else’s house still sucks.

Thanks old dude…

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I spent most of Saturday morning outside laying siege to the trees, bushes, and random foliage that kept smacking me in the face while I was cutting the grass. Sure, I could just duck, but that’s nowhere near as fulfilling as chopping off branches and making nature look you want it to look. While I was standing hip deep in the ditch obliterating a tree that had no business growing there in the first place, I heard a car pull up behind me and a door open. It’s my experience that random people stopping by for anything usually doesn’t end well and I expected a pitch about why I should come to their church or at the very least who I needed to make a donation to some cause or another.

What I ended up with was an introduction to the old dude and his wife who live diagonally across the street from me – nice people who just wanted to stop and say thanks for making the outside of the place not look like crap. Not surprisingly, he brought up the previous tenants who apparently were every bit as worthless as I imagined them to be. Not like that’s a surprise, but it’s always nice to have confirmation. Other than keeping things mowed at a reasonable length and laying down plenty of weed killer, I haven’t actually done much. I should probably be grateful to the last guy for setting the bar so low.

The old dude would be less impressed if he saw the inside of the place with its god awful drywall patches, cut-ins done but walls not painted, doorknobs missing latches, and general lack of even the most basic maintenance. I’m fixing the things I can with the tools and supplies I have on hand, but lord knows I’m not sinking a dime of my own money into this place. I just need to nurse it through the next year or two and then it will be someone else’s problem. There’s very little I can do to remedy a cheapskate landlord or lazy property management, so the least I can do while I’m here is try to prevent this place from being that house that drags down everyone else’s property values by having that nice abandoned look about it. But seriously, thanks for noticing.

Air…

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You can imagine my surprise when I walked upstairs a few minutes ago and found the temperature hovering somewhere in the low 80s. The A/C was on after all and even though it’s a smallish window unit, it usually doesn’t have any problem cooling the bedroom and office to something approaching a livable temperature. That is, of course, when the condenser coil isn’t frozen solid. Before I rush to judgement and start raising three kinds of hell about it, I’m going to let the thing thaw out and then run some tests to see if it was just me letting it run too long in high humidity we’ve had this week or if it’s something wrong with the unit itself like a freon leak.

Given the upstairs issue, I thought it would be a good time to check the main wall unit in the living room. I almost wish I could have avoided that experience. After dropping the front cover, I have suspicions that this was probably the first time the cover has ever been off the unit. And there’s not one chance in a 1000 that the filter has ever been so much as brushed off, let alone actually cleaned. Any guesses how I spent the last hour of my Sunday night?

I don’t know why something like that would surprise me about this place any more. If they can’t figure out the big maintenance issues, I don’t suppose there’s a prayer of them paying attention to the details. Admittedly, most of my experience with renting has been in apartment communities, but I just don’t remember those having such problematic upkeep and management issues. I hate the thought of moving all tis crap again, but unless there are some radical changes in the way things are done around here, I’ll be looking for new digs in about 10 months.

On the up side, I just sent the owner a $225 bill for having the Expedition towed. That at least gave me a warm fuzzy.

Two ways to do things…

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I got a call Friday afternoon from my own property manager. It seems the crack in the kitchen window had finally gotten to the point of needing to be replaced. If I hadn’t been thinking months ago about the house becoming a rental property, I would have fixed it already. The up side of being a landlord is that alot of projects that were a normal expense when you were living in the house magically become a business expense (and therefore deductible) when you have a tenant.

You didn’t really need to know that little bit of administrative minutia except it was my way of saying that there’s a right way and a wrong way to be a landlord/property manager. The right way is to adress issues as they come up and do it as expeditiously as possible. It helps build the tenant-owner relationship and maybe buys you some good will when the lease is up and they have to decide between renewing and moving on. The wrong way would have been to make the tenant call half a dozen times, not show up when I said I would, or otherwise ignore the problems. Doing things that way tends to breed an attitude where the tenant doesn’t give a damn what happens to the property.

I guess there are two schools of thought when it comes to owning rental property. For some, it’s an income stream and nothing more. For others, it’s a long term investment that builds more value when it’s well maintained. Both ways of thinking are probably valid to some degree, but only one of them is right.

I brief flicker of understanding…

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I picked up the mail this afternoon and seeing a letter from Delmarva Power, opened it assuming it was a bill for having the service turned on or for a partial first month. I was, of course, wrong. It was a “final notice” to the previous tenant. A final notice in the amount of $2,141 and change. Seriously? Two questions come immediately to mind… 1) How exactly does someone rack up a $2000 electric bill and 2) Why does Delmarva Power let someone rack up a $2000 bill? At first I was angry as a customer, because this is the kind of irresponsible deadbeat that everyone who bothers to pay their bills ends up paying for in the end… because lets face it, the power company is going to get their money one way or another.

After my moment of capitalist outrage, I had a brief flicked of understanding  about why the property manager seemed to be so blasé about getting things done to the house. If they stuck the power company with that kind of bill, how much back rent did they owe? The natural expectations would be that after getting hosed the first time, the next tenant would pull the same act so deferring maintenance would almost seem natural. As a landlord, I can relate to that feeling. As a tenant, though, I know I’m going to pay my bills passing sympathy I had for the landlord and property manager evaporated quickly enough.

There’s plenty of backstory to go along with this, but for the moment, we’ll just say that the property manager is supposed to be here tomorrow to start addressing the laundry list I sent the owner yesterday. One or both of them is probably pissed off about this situation, but I doubt there in the same league of peeved that I’ve been in for the last few days. We’ll see how it goes.