Besides our regular 40 hours a week jobs that both Britton and I have, we also have our rentals in the Greeley/Evans area. We have four rentals that are single-family residences and we also rent out our basement bedroom/bathroom a few months out of the year.
(For illustration only. Not one of our properties)
Really, being a property manager (I like that term better than “landlord”) is like any other job with ups and downs. The only difference is that in this job, our business is the keeping of homes and so when someone’s home life gets chaotic, it affects us as well. So to be an effective landlord/property manager, we have to have a very stable and financially secure home life ourselves.
Our home life is sort of the foundation for all the others. If we couldn’t manage our home life, how would we pay our mortgage? And if we couldn’t pay our mortgage, you can bet that the other rental mortgages, insurance, taxes, repairs, etc would be the last to be taken care of. Therefore it would create an unstable home life for the tenants residing in the properties. So we take on a great deal of responsibility and obligation to maintain not only our home, but the homes of all of these people who in a contractual way rely on us as much as we rely on them.
And so, it saddens us when we hear that one of our rentals -our first!- will more than likely be vacated soon. It’s too bad because they’ve not only been great tenants, but are also our friends. And for that reason we’d rather they stay. They’ve lived there going on 4 years! But sometimes, that’s not up to us. No matter how stable and settled our home life is, we can’t make everyone’s that way.
We’ve been thinking about whether we want to sell the property or rent it out again. Because it was our first, it was also our most expensive. When we bought it, it was in move-in condition. Which was great to get our feet wet in the whole rental business, but not so great for the cost because the mortgage is more than we get in rent. So, especially as we are trying to save up for Puerto Rico, this is not very good timing when our basement apartment will be empty, too.
So we feel a little less stable than usual. A little bit edgy. A little anxious. But, you know what? We will be ok, no matter what. We always are. We have our great paying jobs, we have substantial savings and we’ve never had trouble renting any of our properties within just a couple of days of posting them. What I’ve learned in life is that even the weirdest most obviously “bad” things can actually be seen as an opportunity if you let them. We built this foundation strong after all. It can handle a few good shakes.
