Today we’d like to talk a bit about whether you should let tenants perform maintenance on your property. The answer to this question: absolutely not.
The liability of having a tenant do any kind of maintenance on your property is huge. We can give you a lot of examples but at the end of the day, you don’t want a tenant to do any kind of maintenance on your property. You don’t know if the tenant has the proper skill level, and you don’t know if the tenant can fix it properly. There is no benefit to letting tenants do maintenance for you. If you’re going to reduce the rent for a tenant because he made a repair, you might as well hire a professional. That’s our advice anyway and it applies all the time. Hire a professional, get the problem fixed right and you won’t have the liability of a tenant fixing something on your property.
What’s the worst that can happen? The tenant could electrocute a child or burn the house down. So many things can happen when a tenant does maintenance on a property, and none of them are good. And you don’t find that out until the damage is done and you wish you hadn’t done it.
If you have any questions about this topic, or you’d like to talk further, please contact us at Florida Management & Consulting Group in Coral Springs.
Military: David Harper is a retired United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. As a Lieutenant he served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War (1968-1969) where he was a Casualty Staging Officer ( Aeromedical Evacuation). He was tasked with moving wounded Soldiers and Marines from Vietnam to various military hospitals in the theatre and eventually Stateside. After serving in several Air Force Reserve Units he was “called up” to serve in Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-1991) Where he was Chief Planner on the Central Command Staff for the Aeromedical Evacuation of all US Casualties during the pre-invasion and post-invasion phases. He retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1993. Currently he is the President of the Broward County Chapter of the Military Officer’s Association of America.
South Florida Property Manager Roger Schalk is a member of the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM), and the Florida Association of Property Managers (FARPM). A real estate professional for 18 years he has spent his entire professional career managing and developing company’s and their employees in customer facing roles and has successfully established himself in Property Management.