Landlording in San Diego: Vol. 2

Be the Best Landlord.
Set Yourself Up For Success.

Being a landlord in the city of San Diego can be a challenging job. We created a second volume of our landlord guide to assist you in managing your property. This packet is full of helpful information that will make you a better landlord.

We cover topics like…

  • Tips for getting the best tenant for your rental property
  • Common lease violations and how to prevent them
  • and more

Don’t fall behind. Learn how to be a better landlord.

Download your guide here:

Choose Your Next Step

We’ve helped over 1,000 San Diego landlords live the good life and we’re ready to help you too. Whatever you choose, you’re heading in the right direction. You will live the good life!

Congratulations! You’ve decided to rent out your property. You’re probably excited about this new opportunity and eager to get your home rented. However, Binglandlord isn’t always a walk in the park, especially with new things like California’s AB3088 and the CDC eviction moratorium thanks to COVID-19. Binglandlord is more challenging than ever. We’ve put together this list of five tips to help you become the best lawyer in law that you can be. Tip number one, get organized. This is the one of the most important things that you can do as a property owner. Because not only will you have your own property documents and mortgage payments stick here, but you’ll have tenants, leases, applications, their payments and things like that. First, decide if you’re going to accept online rent payments or if you want them in person. As in regards to the lease, you can find solid examples of leases online, but you should always have your attorney check it over. Tip number two, do your research. Unfortunately, Binglandlord is not as simple as sticking a foreign sign in your yard in hoping you get a tenant. 2020 has been a specially complicated year for property owners. In January, we had AB422 pass, which affected rent control of uncertain properties and just cause eviction. And then two months later, COVID hit, which impacted a lot of tenants across the state. In late August, AB3088 was passed by Governor Newsom, which protected tenants that were financially affected by COVID-19. Around the same time, the CDC enacted their own moratorium, which was an unprecedented case. These two laws kind of disagree with each other, so it can be very hard to navigate how it’s going to affect your property and if you can evict your tenants for whatever reason. On top of new local laws, you also need to pay attention to fair housing laws. You might be thinking, I don’t really want to rent to college students or families or things like that. All of those are fair housing violations that can get you into huge trouble and cost you a lot of money. Lastly, another thing you’ll need to research when you’re landlord is the market condition in your area. You might think, oh, well, my home can easily rent for $3,000 a month. But if you don’t do proper research on the neighborhood and see what your home can actually rent for compared to the others it’s competing with, you might end up overpriced and sitting on the market too long, which will cost you more money than a lower rent rate would. Tip number three, outline a communication plan with your tenants regarding maintenance. Maintenance can be one of the things that makes or breaks your relationship with your tenants because when they have a problem they want to fix immediately. The first thing you want to do is establish with them how they should communicate with you regarding a problem. Do you want them to email you? Do you want them to call you? Do you want them to call you in case of emergency? But if it’s not an emergency send you an email or text. These are all things that should be outlined so that you’re not bothered by your tenants 24-7 and they know the best way to get a response from you. You also want to keep them in the loop regarding the maintenance issue. And even if there’s no update to give them letting them know once a day might be best just so they understand that you are keeping an eye on the issue and are eager to get it fixed just like they are. Tip number four, don’t show your property well occupied. You might think that putting your home on the market as soon as you get noticed to vacate from your current tenants is the best idea. However, this creates a number of issues. One being that you’ll have to coordinate with your current tenants about when you can show the home to prospective tenants. This creates a whole mess of scheduling with your schedule, the prospective tenants that want to move into your home and the current tenants that are just trying to go about their lives and are interrupted with showings. Second reason is that the home is now going to be full of someone else’s belongings. This makes it very hard for prospective tenants to picture themselves in your home when it’s still cluttered by your current tenants items. Additionally, if they want to take measurements of the rooms, they won’t be able to and you won’t know if there are any additional damages to the property that might be hidden by your current tenants furniture. This means that even if you rent the property to these prospective tenants that have now viewed your home, you might have damages that you weren’t prepared for that you have to repair prior to their move in which may in turn push their move in back and delay the whole process. Tip number five, have a written rental criteria that you stick to. We already discussed the importance of fair housing laws and how they can get you into trouble. Having a written rental criteria can vastly help you when it comes to processing applications. They’re the obvious things that you want to look at, like credit, income requirement, background check and things like that. Additionally, you can contact an applicant’s prior landlord to see what kind of tenant they were if they had any major property damages or they would overall recommend them as a tenant. This can help you get some insight on what they were like at previous properties, but it can also delay your application processing depending on how long a landlord takes to get back to you. Remember, you should stick to this written rental criteria for every single applicant to avoid any fair housing issues. That way, if an applicant brings something up or has any questions, you can direct them back to this criteria that you’ve established for any and all applicants. And there you have it. Those are our five tips to help you be the best landlord that you can be. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment and don’t forget to like and subscribe.