Landlording

Mr. K has decided having rental houses just takes up too much of his time. He's really busy at work, and the rental houses have been losing money left and right because he doesn't have time to deal with the vacancies.

He decided this the first full week of January. I got three of the four houses on the market on the 12th. The last one still isn't on the market. I needed to evict the tenant and Mr. K needs to fix up the apartment enough to sell and/or rent it. This is the one I want gone the most of them all.

Since Mr. K has been so busy, I've had to show the places during the day, and I had to go to court to evict the tenant while a friend of mine watched K. I got a tenant into the lower level of the one in which we are removing the tenant. I'm hoping/planning to sign a lease with someone this weekend on my other duplex. I hope that goes as planned. I haven't formally finished the eviction at the one in which I went to court, but the guy has moved out and left the keys on the counter. I assume the sheriff won't need to do anything since he's not there.

I never wanted any rental houses, and I was only supposed to have to put the ads in the paper and schedule showings for Mr. K. Now I'm having to go to court and do showings (with K) myself. I absolutely hate it, but it must be done to stop the bleeding of cash from these rentals and to make them more marketable. I guess it's easier to sell investment property with tenants in place.

Meanwhile, a pipe broke over the weekend two weekends ago at one of my rentals, and I had to cancel the one showing to a potential investor that place had. I also got to pay emergency rates for a plumber. At least the lady was home when the pipe burst. It could have been so much worse.

I've also had to pay a repair company a lot of money to fix the roof on a metal shed we have at another rental house and to had to pay to put insulation in the attic because the tenant complained about his high gas bill. This tenant always pays his rent on time, so I need to keep him happy.

I can't wait to be out of the rental business. It's too bad we are selling when the housing market is so bad. We'll take a killing there, but I won't have to worry every time the phone rings that a tenant is having problems.