Refining the Approval Process

It’s the first of June and I still have no tenants for property Beta’s upstairs unit. Jaleena gave me the creeps and, when I asked her to have her landlord contact me again to go over "discrepancies", she copped an attitude. Maybe because she knew I caught her or maybe because I was completely wrong and Jaleena had had enough of my bullshit—I'll never really know. I just know how I felt about her and made a decision based on the facts presented. Right or wrong, at least I’m following instincts this time around.

I chose Ashley who was supposed to come by today to sign the lease at 9am but she’s a no-show, and I’m not gonna bother calling her. When a prospective doesn’t make an appointment it’s usually because they found another place. Calling them makes no sense because, even if they forgot, do I really want the type of tenant that forgets a lease signing?! I’ll be patient and wait until the 15^th before panicking. The apartment is almost completely done (with the exception of the Moen antique faucet) and Handyman Stan did a great job. I’m not going to rush and get some loser that messes up all this great work. I already have a Nicky.

I will say, however, that I need to get my system of screening and approving tenants a lot faster. This is now the second week that Stan’s old unit has been empty and I have yet to find a replacement. If this happens when I have 30 units I would be broke! From the time a tenant leaves, it should take 7 full days to get the repairs done and the property rented out to new tenants—10 days max. Seems like a difficult thing to accomplish but I know it’s possible, especially if I'm practicing good business. I have to get my system down so that I can do a fairly decent common sense background check and approval within 30 minutes. I took too long to call references and verify job history with this first batch of prospectives, which was probably why things fell apart this week. 

The minute a prospective tenant is out of my sights, I have to call those references and make a decision on whether that person is qualified. I must have the questions ready to go--which was another thing I didn't do right. When I called the personal references this week, I was asking very generic and stupid questions like, "Do you think this is a good person? Do you trust this person? Do you believe they can pay rent on time?) What the fuck is someone going to say? NO?! This is great practice and experience so I had better learn as much as I can from this transition process. When I have more properties to manage in the future, taking this long to rent an apartment in a great neighborhood like Eastling will be unacceptable.