The number one goal of your rental business should be to make money, not give it away. One way to protect you and your investment is to have proper insurances in place. Let me introduce you to four insurances that you should consider.
A Good Lease
The first insurance that I posses is the insurance of a good lease and a thorough move-in inspection. More than once I have referred to the pictures of a move-in inspection to counter a tenant's claim about a pre-existing condition. I remember one time during a preliminary move-out inspection I noted a cracked ceramic floor tile. The tenant claimed that it was like that when they moved in. I turned on my laptop, pulled up the appropriate picture from the move-in inspection, and proved to the tenant that the crack was in fact not there when they moved in.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both published articles in the past six weeks stating that the housing market has reached a bottom. But hold on for just a minute… It seems that not everyone believes it.
There are many complicated ways to analyze the market conditions in your local area, enough to confuse and boggle the novice investor’s mind. However, you can keep things simple by using our “MAD” method. This means paying attention to three important factors and noting whether they’re going up or down:
One crisp fall Sunday afternoon under bright blue skies, my wife and I visited five homes up for sale. We remembered them by their street names: Big Acre, Blue Silo, Pontiac, Prairie Rose and Lamont. The lineup has a poetic ring to it, but the real music is the potential rates of return from owning them and renting them out.
The Federal Reserve was supposed to protect the value of the U.S. dollar – at least that’s how it was originally sold to the public. We still don’t know why the dollar needed “protection”. It was solid for the longest time, except for the time when President Lincoln printed too many of them to pay for the War between the States, but those dollars came and went.