Resetting a Rental

We recently reset and relisted a 3BR/2BA rental unit less than a week after vacant! While we’ve had some units that required little to no repairs, most, including this one, needed some fairly substantial work to reset. The home had definitely been lived in hard, and needed a full paint, cleaning, yard work and numerous smaller repairs.

Before we cracked the code, re-setting a unit as seemingly straight forward as this one would have taken probably 2-3 weeks. Now we’ve got it down to just a few days. How did we cut the time in more than half? Well, that’s the topic this week, how to reset a rental to standard with a quickness! We’ve found there are three best practices to resetting units quickly.

Outsource. If you’ve read any of my material, you know I firmly believe that paying others to do work you can do yourself is not a good business model. Back when we started our rental business, I would do almost 100% of the reset work myself except for perhaps the most technical of tasks.  Painting and cleaning are the most common and important tasks when resetting a rental unit. Both take a lot of time when doing it yourself!  

With just me and my sons painting a unit at night and on the weekend, it would sometimes take two weeks before we could get the home back in rent ready shape. The same goes for cleaning. A 1400 square foot 3 bedroom and 2 bath unit may not sound like much, but getting the floors, toilets, fridges, ranges etc… in tip top condition takes forever with just one person doing the work!

To quickly reset, one must outsource these tasks. We’ve recently found a painting and cleaning team that does good work at a reasonable price. They were able to do a full paint (walls and trim) in three days and clean in one day. More importantly, it was completed during the work week! While this is a pretty significant expense, it’s still tax deductible. More importantly, the job is done, and I don’t have to drag these repairs out over the next couple of weekends!

Plan ahead. Unless the tenant abandons, their departure is not a secret.  If a property manager waits until the tenant is out of the unit to line up vendors, they will be way behind schedule! Most good service professionals will be booked up weeks in advance. When we knew we had an upcoming departure, we immediately got on our painter’s schedule and had them inspect the unit two weeks before vacant. As a result, they were able to start work the day after the tenant moved out. This goes for pretty much any outsourced repairs.

While this seems like a no brainer, planning ahead is a little harder than it sounds especially if your rental business is a side hustle. The owner / property manager must spend time in the unit before vacant and understand what repairs, such as a full paint, may be needed. Similarly, a thorough and detailed move out inspection should be completed the day of a tenant’s departure. Waiting just one day to inspect costs precious time. 

Defer some repairs.   This comes down to knowing which repairs can be completed after advertising the unit and showing the unit to prospective tenants. I’ll begin with a caveat, never show a dirty home to a prospective tenant. It just sends a bad message.

However, there are several repairs a manager can defer to after listing the unit or even until after a new tenant has moved in. For instance, while we photographed and listed our unit last Friday, the carpet cleaners weren’t scheduled until the following Monday. You can’t tell from the pics and most prospective tenants wouldn’t notice when viewing the apartment. Similarly, this unit needed new countertops. Countertops are one of those repairs with a ridiculously long repair time. We will rent our vacant unit with the understanding that we’ll have vendors coming in to replace the counter tops in the coming weeks. Again, this may seem like a no brainer but in our early years of the rental business we would try to have a unit 100% reset before listing and thus wasted precious days!

While our expenses have gone up performing quick resets, the old adage “time is money” proves true. We had our unit on the market at least two weeks earlier than if I’d done all the work myself. Not to mention the paint probably looks a heck of a lot better than if I’d done it! We’ll get a new tenant in faster which in the end will save us several hundred dollars if the unit was vacant two or three extra weeks. While the math doesn’t work out exactly perfect, the benefits of a quick rental unit reset far outweigh the costs. One week is our new standard for resetting our rentals!

Interested in rental property investing? Look for “Collect Rent, Don’t Pay It: A Beginner’s Guide to Rental Property Investing” on Amazon to learn how our family turned rental property investing into a successful side hustle!

Looking for a good how-to on wealth building? Check out my book, Millionaire on a Worker’s Budget: Five Financial Truth’s to Build Wealth on sale now at Amazon!

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