What Are Your Landlord Challenges?
$100 oil seems to be rather good for the economy. The economic activity created by this surge in prices is rippling through the province and is only in the early stages of generating increased job creation, leading to increasing wages and in this article, additional landlord challenges.
The last few years have been considerably harder on many of the local landlords than the middle of the decade. With property values dropping, more potential tenants leaving the province and what appeared to be non-stop layoffs occurring, many landlords found themselves with vacant properties, non-paying tenants and even properties that were under water. This represented the ultimate challenge many landlords.
To try and understand more of the challenges many landlords were facing, I recently had a group of my online readers complete a survey about some of the biggest challenges they were seeing and the results were quite interesting to me. In hindsight though, it really shouldn’t be surprising.
The Number One Landlord Challenge?
So what was the number one challenge? In my rather informal survey, for over 62% of the respondents, the biggest challenge they had was finding quality tenants. The number two challenge, which was far behind at only 20%, was screening tenants.
Obviously having a quality tenant in your property takes considerable pressure off of the property owner, by why is it such a challenge to find them? There has to be some quality tenants, they didn’t all just turn into homeowners! In fact, to hear many landlords there are no good tenants out there and that is just wrong.
Perhaps understanding where many of the landlords out there acquire their information sheds some light on part of the problem. Fortunately, I also included this question in my survey, all in an effort to get a better indication of how these property owners learned their landlording skills.
Surprisingly, or perhaps obviously, 73% of the respondents never took any serious training. They were simply self-taught with a majority of them learning information off of the internet (60%). Now the internet can be a great source of information, but is it truly the best place to learn how to manage an expensive asset?
This topic is a double edged sword for me as I personally have hundreds of articles and tips I’ve written and shared on various websites and forums out in cyberspace. If people were not actively looking for information online, much of the help and support I have provided would have been wasted, yet I know it has helped many people over the years.
Still, people should not solely depend on the internet for their education. While the internet can be a great resource, landlords should be looking at other sources such as Real Estate investment groups, mentoring, and even books. Personally, my wife and I used all of these (including the internet) to increase our education.
In our case, the most effective method was becoming involved with one of these investment groups (in our case it was the Real Estate Investment Network or REIN). It provided us with the information we needed to rapidly accelerate our learning curve and it exposed us to multiple other investors who became our mentors and guides along the way. While the cost to join a good program was an initial deterrent, the impact was life changing and the costs paid for themselves in no time.
This direct access to similar minded people who we could turn to for advice, guidance and best practices quickly helped rid us of many of the challenges we formerly faced and is why we highly recommend this method as the quickest way to success for landlords. That along with the quality training and education that REIN provided of course.
Many of the challenges landlords face are only challenges because we don’t yet have the answers, don’t understand the process or simply haven’t been educated in how to avoid them. Following the footsteps of others and using that knowledge to leverage your growth will help reduce many of those challenges.
Investor Perspective
One of the quickest ways to success is to find someone else who has been successful doing what you want to do and then repeat their process. As you often hear, “Success leaves clues!”.
Mentors, trusted sources, investment groups these all help contribute to learning those steps. Hopefully my information that I provide is also included in this group. If you’re just following along and not actively participating in Real Estate investments, it’s fine to continue to gather information. If you truly want to get serious about investing in Real Estate (or actually becoming serious about any field!), you need to get some serious training and groups or clubs are some of the best methods.
Now not all are of the same calibre, so you need to do your homework, but if you start surrounding yourself with like minded people, you will eventually start experiencing like minded results.
Over the next couple of months I am going to put together some courses and reports on how to be a better landlord, I’ll keep everyone in the loop as they become available, so if you have any questions you feel should be included or any areas of landlording that should be covered, I would love to hear it.
