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What
are Slum Landlords and
Why You Should Avoid Becoming a Slumlord
Whether
you are a landlord or tenant, it pays to learn about slum landlords and
how they work. If you own rental properties, find out how to manage
your tenants and real estate the right way and avoid becoming a
slumlord yourself.
What are Slum
Landlords or Slumlords?
Slumlords are generally irresponsible landlords who spend little or no
money and effort maintaining their rental properties.
As a result, their properties are often in a dismal condition and fail
to meet the basic health and safety standards set by their local
housing authorities. Because of the unsightly, sloppy state of their
properties, they may end up lowering the values of other real estate in
the neighborhood.
To attract tenants to their run-down properties, slumlords
will generally ask for low rents and tend to be more casual when
screening tenants. Some of them will simply accept the first person who
comes along and is willing to pay their asking rent without any doing
background checks at all.
Slum landlords may also paying property taxes and fines because they
count on selling off their property before their local authorities take
action and seize their real estate.
Why You
Should Avoid Becoming a Slumlord at All Costs
When it
comes to choosing tenants, picking the right ones will often
mean that you are effectively eliminating up to 80% of any future
problems. For slum landlords, they often do not have the luxury of
choosing highly qualified tenants because their property is likely to
attract very few renters in the first place.
If you want to learn how to pick reliable, rent-paying tenants, Click here for our
complete guide on how to run landlord credit checks.
In fact many slumlords end up having to evict their tenants due to
non-payment of rent or violation of the lease agreements. From our
personal experience, trust us when we say that the cost and hassle of
maintaining your property is nothing when compared to the nightmare of
having to fight eviction lawsuits in court.
Naturally many slumlords are not welcomed and many cities have set up
task forces just to hunt them down and punish them. Once you are
tracked down, you will not only have to fork out money for repair bills
but also pay heavy fines as well.
You will not be able to join any government subsidized housing programs
such as the Section 8 program in the USA. They will usually send home
inspectors to check the condition of your property before they allow
your tenants to live in.
This will further shrink your pool of possible tenants and make it near
impossible to obtain guaranteed rent payments and grants from your
local government.
Why Some Property
Owners End Up Being Slum Landlords
Some people
have asked us why some landlords will neglect their
property and leave it in shambles so we decided to answer this question
here.
The first
major reason is because a lot of slum landlords are not
interested in being proper landlords in the first place. What do I mean
by that? These people are more concerned with buying property then
reselling it fast for a quick profit. In other words, they are into
flipping property.
Monthly payments from rent collection are merely a sideline income for
these people while they hunt for a suitable buyer. Some of them also
use their rental property as a convenient tax shelter to slash their
tax payments.
Another reason for people turning to the dark side of becoming
slumlords is the fact they no longer have any interest or money to
maintain their rental properties.
Owning and managing a rental property is a bit like running a business.
If you deprive your rental property of passion or maintenance funds, it
will naturally decay and die a slow death.
Want to learn MORE practical must-know facts to
maintain your rental property?
Return from
this Slum Landlords page to our Property
Landlord Rental Repairs guide
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