A well drafted lease is something that you must have if you are going to be renting out your property.  The laws in each state are slightly different so be careful – a lease must both spell out the entire agreement between you and your tenant and must meet all of the requirements of your state.  If you miss a key element, enforcing your lease can be costly and troublesome. 

The lease is a binding contract that defines the responsibilities of the two parties – the tenant and the landlord.  A well drafted lease protects your tenant from abuses and misunderstandings, and it protects you from tenants who make unreasonable demands or make claims of verbal agreements that never existed.

A lease has many components, but here are a few you should ensure are in the final lease form you use:

Alterations:  Your lease should clearly state the kind and extent of alterations that you will allow in your property.   

Subleasing:  Your lease should state very clearly if subleasing is allowed. If it is allowed, be very clear on the terms.

Due Dates and Late Fees:  Your lease should be very clear on when rent is due, when a late fee will be assessed, and the amount of the late fee. 

Form of Payment:  Your lease should specify clearly what forms of payment you will allow.  Checks?  Cash?  Cashier’s Checks?  Money Orders?

Access:   As an owner and landlord, you should have access to your property for periodic inspections. Your lease should detail when and how you will enter the property to conduct inspections.  State laws vary on this subject and your lease should conform to the laws of your state.

Maintenance:  Your lease should state very clearly who is responsible for the maintenance of the property.   If it is a joint responsibility (not a good idea), the lease should make clear who is responsible for what.

Utility Payments:  Your lease should be very clear about which party is responsible for which utilities that serve the property.   Be particularly cautious about garbage service.  While many landlords consider this a utility, many states have laws that deal strictly with which party is responsible for garbage service.

Abandonment:  Your lease should be very specific on the subject of abandonment.  It must clearly define your options if your tenant leaves the property without notice.

Are you ready to maximize the value of your income property investments?  Contact Grid Property Management, LLC today to learn about our full range of management services designed specifically to eliminate the tasks, challenges, and headaches of residential property management.  Our Management Success Formula™ program is the most comprehensive full-service residential management program in the market today. 

Whether you own a single property or an extensive portfolio here in the Portland, Oregon metro area, Grid Property Management, LLC is the ideal residential management partner to help make your home, condo, townhouse, or plex income property investments a success!

If you own rental property, all of your revenue is tied to keeping the property rented at all times.  An empty house is not producing any revenue and that defeats all of your other efforts. 

Here are five quick tips to successfully rent your home:

Curb Appeal: Curb appeal is an important area on which to focus your money and your efforts.  When potential residents drive by, you want your property to be attractive and appealing.  Statistics show time and time again that people rent homes because of what they see when they drive by.  If your property is unattractive, you will have a hard time renting no matter what other tactics you use.

Signage:  Be sure to put a sign in the yard.  The sign should be large enough that it will catch the eye of someone driving by.  You want your sign to be professional and attractive.  Drive by the property often to make sure the sign is still up and the property is in top shape.

Get the Word Out:  Make it easy for people to know about your home.  Research the area and see how people are looking for homes. Use at least five different online sources to market your home.  Craigslist is a popular website, but not everyone uses Craigslist.  Make sure you are marketing the home every day!

Answer the Phone:  Answer the phone when it rings!  Many people or businesses use an automated voicemail service for convenience, but this can make it frustrating for potential tenants.  Have a person available to answer the phone and respond to questions. 

Set Asking Rents Deliberately:  Be sure to thoroughly research the asking rents for similar homes in your immediate area.  Do online research, but get out and drive the comparables the way your tenants will.  It is tempting to base your rents on the amount of your mortgage payment, but there is no connection between these two figures.

Are you ready to maximize the value of your income property investments?  Contact Grid Property Management, LLC today to learn about our full range of management services designed specifically to eliminate the tasks, challenges, and headaches of residential property management.  Our Management Success Formula™ program is the most comprehensive full-service residential management program in the market today. 

Whether you own a single property or an extensive portfolio here in the Portland, Oregon metro area, Grid Property Management, LLC is the ideal residential management partner to help make your home, condo, townhouse, or plex income property investments a success!

The cold weather has arrived!  It’s time to make sure your rental home has been winterized.  Here are a few tips to help you make this happen:

Turn Off Water:  Turn off the water supply to any exterior hoses or sprinkler systems.  Drain the water from the hoses, and drain the entire sprinkler system of water.  Don’t forget to address any water lines from AC units.

Reverse Your Fans:  Reverse the direction of any ceiling fans.  Switch the blades to rotate clockwise to recirculate warm air that rises to the highest point in the room back down into the room.

Wrap Pipes:  Insulate exposed supply piping in the crawlspace, and wrap or cap hose spigots.  Wrap your water heater, too.

Caulk Windows:   Sometimes you can see a substantial gap in the window framing just by looking.  If you can’t see the gap, it may still be there.  Your tenant will sure feel it on a cold, windy day.

Change Furnace Filters:  If you use traditional filters, replace them monthly.  You can also invest in a reusable filter that you (or your tenant) can clean and reuse.  Once a month just rinse with water and it comes out looking new!

Program the Thermostat:  A programmable thermostat is affordable and easy to install, and will give your tenants control over their heating bills. 

Install Weather Stripping:  Weather stripping is a simple addition that can make a big difference.  Install weather stripping around all external doors. This will also save your tenant money on energy bills.

Insulate the Attic: Beyond the obvious benefits of lower heat bills for your tenant, a well-insulated attic can avert a major leak event.  With an uninsulated attic, the warm roof melts rooftop snow too quickly and the subsequent water, trapped by unmelted snow and ice lower on the roof, has nowhere to drain.  Snowmelt blocked by an ice dam can find its way through the roofing material and into the house, causing a whole host of new problems — damage to ceilings or walls and potentially inviting mold issues down the road.

Clean Gutters:  Remove leaves and other debris from gutters.  Blockages add extra weight that strains the mounting of your gutters and can contribute to the formation of ice dams and flooding into the home.  Overflowing gutters can allow water to accumulate in the soil near a basement wall, leading to seepage or even a flooded basement.

Hopefully these tips will help you keep your tenants warm and happy this winter and might even save both you and your tenants a bit of money!

Are you ready to maximize the value of your income property investments?  Contact Grid Property Management, LLC today to learn about our full range of management services designed specifically to eliminate the tasks, challenges, and headaches of residential property management.  Our Management Success Formula™ program is the most comprehensive and well designed full-service residential management program in the market today. 

Whether you own a single property or an extensive portfolio here in the Portland, Oregon metro area, Grid Property Management, LLC is the ideal residential management partner to help make your home, condo, townhouse, or plex income property investments a success!

One of the six basic human needs is significance. Everyone wants to feel important and feel that they are valued by others.  As a landlord, you want your tenant to know they are appreciated, and the Holidays are a great time to make this a priority. There are many ways to express your gratitude to your tenants during the Holidays.  All you have to do is think creatively!

Some landlords give tenants gift cards for pizza, coffee shops, local restaurants, or grocery stores. It doesn’t have to be a large amount. A gift card is always appreciated regardless of the amount.  Depending on the size of your portfolio, you may give a gift card ranging from $5.00-$25.00. 

Other landlords demonstrate appreciation to their tenants with gifts of food. Homemade cookies, tins of popcorn, candy, or fruit baskets are almost always welcomed. An idea we like is the five-pound box of small oranges that most groceries carry. You can’t beat them for a healthy and inexpensive gift. You can’t always know if your recipient has dietary limitations, but most folks will pass along anything they cannot eat.

Some landlords will drop off poinsettia, other flowers, or plants to brighten their tenant’s homes for the holidays.

For multi-unit landlords and property managers, a holiday card is easier to manage. You can mail each tenant a holiday card or send an ecard.  The ecard is easy to send to a large number of tenants.   These days, you can’t be too careful in considering tenants’ individual beliefs and religions. Not everyone shares in the same celebrations, so don’t offend a tenant with the wrong message.

Whether you choose to send a gift certificate, fruit basket, flowers, or a card, your tenants will feel appreciated knowing you were thinking of them during the holidays.

Why Choose Grid Property Management, LLC?

We recognize that when it comes to selecting a property management company in Portland, OR, you have lots of choices. Ultimately, your choice comes down to the confidence you have in the property management partner you select to deliver the results you expect from your income property.

As you consider your choices, here are the top 10 reasons why you should select Grid Property Management, LLC as your property management partner:

1.)  Client Focus:  All of us here at Grid understand that income property management is a professional service business that is entirely relationship based. Our focus every day is on serving our Owner and Tenant clients. We recognize that our success will be completely determined by the degree to which we are viewed as a highly capable, reliable, professional service that is dedicated 24/7 to our clients. We want to earn your business, and we know that we have to continue earning your business each and every day. We want to be viewed as an essential part of the success of your income property investments, and we are willing to work very hard to earn and re-earn that role.

2.)  Experience:  We first began building and managing our own income property portfolio in 2002. From the very beginning we invested aggressively in the tools, processes, and structure needed to deliver a professional and successful rental experience to all of our Tenant clients. In 2006 we formed Grid Property Management, LLC to put a more complete structure in place as the company grew. We now are in a position to provide nearly ten years of highly successful property management experience, time tested and tuned in the marketplace, for our Owner clients. We'd love to have the opportunity to show you how effective we can be.

3.)  Results:   Since 2002, we have managed the Grid property portfolio at a consistent 92%+ occupancy rate while achieving at-market rents and while keeping our properties well maintained and performing. We'd like to do the same for you!

4.)  Team:  At Grid we have worked very hard to bring together an experienced, capable, responsive team of outside professionals to accomplish our work. Our attorneys, contractors, title companies, screening companies, technologists, CPAs and others have all been selected and retained because they do an excellent job and because we can rely upon them to deliver on their commitments. We have hired outside professionals while keeping our internal team very focused, concentrating only on what we do best and investing in relationships with other professionals who are in turn excellent at their narrow expertise. The result is a coordinated team of professionals all working inside their area of strength and all focused on achieving success for our Owner and Tenant clients.

5.)  Technology:  The pace of change in digital technology is both exciting and bewildering. Grid has made a commitment to aggressively embrace the broad array of digital tools available today for two simple reasons. One, these tools enable us to deliver superior service to our Owner and Tenant clients more rapidly, simply, professionally, and cost-effectively than ever before. Second, today's tenants are more educated than ever before and they expect that a professional management company will have and deploy technology to make all aspects of the management company/tenant relationship easier, faster, and cheaper. From online advertising and digital contract technology to online rent payment and web-based maintenance requests, today's tenants expect technology to be in use and they move towards and stay with management companies and owners that have invested in and deployed these tools.

6.)  Transparency:  One way that we believe we can be an essential partner with you in your income property success is to provide you with the information you need, whenever you need it. Grid has developed a highly sophisticated structure of online digital folders, tied directly to and aligned with The Management Success Formula™ program, to give you 24/7 access to the physical, tenant, and financial records for your property. As an Owner client of GPM, you will have website access to all of the information we have about your property, your tenants, and the financial operations of your property. These comprehensive digital folders are maintained 24/7 and are accessible to you 24/7 from any computer in the world.

7.)  Structure:  The secret to success in property management is to recognize that like many businesses, property management requires a well designed, well built, and professionally managed structure of tools and processes all designed and integrated to deliver consistently outstanding service. At Grid we've taken ten years of property management expertise and put it together in a comprehensive structure we call The Management Success Formula™. Our proprietary MSF™ program gives us a step-by-step, detailed, repeatable methodology to ensure that the experience of each of our Owner and Tenant clients is professional, complete, and exceptional.

8.)  Process:  If the procedures and methods used by a property management company vary from client to client, are poorly documented, or are incomplete and poorly delivered, the experience of one Owner or one Tenant will be different from the experience of others, opening the door to dissatisfied clients and in the case of Tenant clients, opening the door to violations of a complex web of state and federal laws. At Grid, we use our proprietary Management Success Formula™ as the structure that brings together and supports all of our external and internal processes, ensuring that our service delivery is the best it can be, client after client. 

9.)  Toolset:   In the same way that our Management Success Formula™ provides the structure for all of our external and internal client support processes, it also acts as the structure and framework for all of the tools we use to deliver our services to our Owner and Tenant clients. From this website to our forms, checklists, accounting systems, reporting systems, and physical and digital filing systems, the entire scope of the Grid toolset has been built and integrated to deliver a consistently outstanding professional service to our Owner and Tenant clients.

10.)  Caution:  The world of income property management is highly regulated and filled with legal requirements. Grid takes very seriously all of the requirements that a property owner or management company must meet to be successful and to comply with state and federal housing laws. You can be assured that we are very well aware of the legal requirements that owners and property management firms must comply with, that our MSF™ structure and the supporting Grid processes and toolsets that are part of it have been designed to ensure that we stay in full compliance for our benefit and for yours, and that our outside legal team is highly skilled in all aspects of state and federal housing law.