Welcome to adventures in property management!
When you own rental property in South Side Chicago, you sometimes have to deal with things you’d never would’ve seen coming. From the gross to the truly bizarre, your job as the landlord is to handle these situations.
Even the regular run-of-the-mill work to get a property ready for the next tenants can turn into a larger project than initially anticipated. Gouges on walls where the couch tipped into the drywall one too many times will need to be patched. The cracked window needs replacing. Even if you’d planned to replace the carpeting soon, that poorly hidden burn hole in the corner escalates the job.
Somebody Broke That…
When tenants move out, sometimes they try to cover up damages. Other times, it greets us the moment we walk through the front door, like the pulverized tiling that needed to be replaced before we could place another tenant in the property.
However, sometimes we have to repair bigger holes when someone throws open the front door hard enough to smash through drywall with the doorknob.
Or weird rub marks show up on the walls and baseboards.
Other times we can’t even venture a guess as to how damage happened. Water damage from a water balloon fight indoors? Maybe they had a pet beaver?
You have to wonder, what the heck happened… and the tenants just left it that way? Usually, when you ask, they’ll have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s why it’s so important to carefully document every Chicago property at move-in and move-out.
“I Didn’t Know I Was Supposed to Do That”
Possibly one of the more annoying issues we experience as property managers is finding out about problems that would’ve never happened or wouldn’t have been as bad with the proper maintenance.
One tenant complained about high heating bills. It wasn’t until they moved out that we discovered they’d never changed the furnace filter the entire time they lived in the rental. High heating bills would’ve been the least of their problems if the clogged filter had overheated the blower and caused a fire.
Property Managers Do The Dirty Work
When you have a property manager for your Chicago rental home, you don’t have to handle these and tons of other issues. Your property management company can do the (sometimes literal) dirty work for you.
If you own rental property in South Side Chicago, check out the services we offer owners to give you a truly passive, hand-off investment.