Rental Woes

We've had a lot of vandalism problems at the cute little bungalow rental house we got last October. That one is the one Mr. K went to evict the non-rent paying tenants, and they didn't bother to show up in court. When the sheriff came for the eviction, they discovered the tenants had already left, and left the place quite a mess.

Since then, he's lost some windows and the back door to vandals. Once someone had broken in and plugged the stove back in and cranked up the heat. He hadn't bothered to call the police since he wasn't making any insurance claims, and waiting for the police can take a long time. There are a lot more important things (like many murders) that keep the police busy.

Anyway, these vandals have been literally destroying the place faster than Mr. K can fix it up to get a tenant. I filed a no-trespassing letter at the police precinct near the house, and I've been calling them a few times a week to get them to drive by after dark in hopes they'd investigate if they ever saw the lights on after dark.

This morning he called and said someone had broken in through a window, and had done a lot of damage all over the place. They had dumped a can of paint all over a recently painted floor (white paint of a brown floor). I'm not sure why Mr. K even left any paint behind. They broke a window that wasn't all of ten feet from the windows on the next house over. Anyway, he wanted to police to come by, so I called them for him. They even came. The police officer has a pretty good idea which band of juveniles is causing the problem, and he thought it could be stopped. We certainly hope so. A very old guy at the gym who made his fortune in the rental business (now he does private loans for rental investors) suggested we just sell the place, take a loss, and consider it a learning experience.

The police talked to the neighbor, who had heard the break-in. We don't understand why they didn't call the police. Where I live, we look out for our neighbors.

Hopefully the police will get this under control. I stopped by with the kids to bring Mr. K some Burger King for lunch. I didn't realize he had removed the toilet, so we had to keep our stay brief. It was my first visit to the house since the one time I went through it before we purchased it.

Mr. K and I are talking of putting a lot more money down on our next rental so we can buy into a better neighborhood while still having positive cash flow with the mortgage payments.

Personally, I'm not interested in being a landlord at all, but it is what Mr. K wants to do, and Mr. K makes the money that funds the project and Mr. K puts in all the hard work, so if Mr. K wants rentals, Mr. K can have them. I do have veto power over which houses we buy, and I've only used it once. Mr. K later agreed that my veto made sense. It was on a very expensive, labor intensive (needed a lot of fixing up), multi-family old house that would have had negative cash flow for years. I told him that if anything happened to him, we would not be able to keep the place, and it could eat all our savings while waiting to get it sold. We'd owe so much on it, I wouldn't be able to let it go cheaply just to get rid of it.

I've probably just bored everyone; I know I've bored myself.