As a landlord, rental property inspections are essential to maintaining your investment.
Over 47% of Charlotte's population are renters. If you're going to find the best tenant for your vacant rental unit, you need to undergo a thorough tenant screening process. This involves everything from background checks to reference checks.
Once you have a great tenant, the next step is to do a rental property inspection. If you've never done one of these before, it's a very simple but very important part of renting a property. In this post, we're going to give you the landlord's guide to rental property inspections.
Protecting your real estate investments requires a boots-on-the-ground effort on your part. Keep reading and learn how rental property inspections come into play.
What Are Rental Property Inspections?
Rental property inspections are exactly what they sound like. The landlord enters the rental property to ensure its overall condition hasn't changed. It's an important aspect of property maintenance because you inherently have less control over the state of a rental unit.
There are essentially 3 types of rental inspections - move-in, move-out, and anything in-between. You'll always want to do move-in/move-out inspections with your tenants, but any other rental inspections are done at your discretion.
How to Do a Proper Rental Inspection
The goal of a rental property inspection is to assess the condition of your rental investment. When you have a new tenant coming in, you do a walkthrough with them there so that you can both make note of any major or minor damages, blemishes, or technical issues with the unit.
Having a checklist in hand makes doing this a lot easier. It's in everyone's interest to make note of these issues for subsequent inspections. During a move-out inspection, you'll have a copy of the move-in checklist for reference.
If there's any significant new damage that occurred during the tenancy, you'll take the money for repairs out of the damage deposit.
In-Between Inspections
As a landlord, you're entitled to enter your property, but you need to give notice. It's important to review the state and city laws regarding how much notice you must give your tenant. In North Carolina, there aren't any such laws in place, but it's common courtesy to give at least 24 hours.
Quarterly or bi-annual inspections can tell you a lot about how a tenant is living. If there are any major issues, you may be able to evict your tenant. This is a time-consuming process, but it's better than dealing with avoidable property damage.
How a Property Management Company Can Help
Owning rental properties can be a lot of work, especially when you think about things like rental property inspections. If you're finding yourself short on time, it might be best to hire a property management company to take care of these important tasks.
Home River Group is one of the nation's largest full-service property managers. We can help you take care of everything from tenant screening to inspections and maintenance. If you're interested, contact us today to discuss your needs and how we can help.