Why Most Self-Managing Long-Term Rentals Fail — And How You Can Outsmart The Pitfalls Before Losing Thousands

Tony:
Today, we’re revealing that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to long-term rentals because I haven’t had one in the better part of, I don’t know, seven years. And even when I did have one, I had a property manager running it for me. But in about three weeks, I’m going to be self-managing my own long-term rental. And quite frankly, I’m a little terrified. So we have our resident long-term rental expert, Ashley Kehr, who’s going to educate me on how to be a good long-term rental landlord since all I know how to do is welcome in. So Ashley, thank you for joining me on the Real Estate Rookie podcast today.

Ashley:
Tony, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been a longtime listener. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to come on here and share my expertise with you.

Tony:
You barely made the cut, but you are here. After

Ashley:
20 other people declined, you

Tony:
Are here. We have. You were the only one that was willing to fly to California to do this with me. So yeah, so context for all of our rookies. So Sarah, my wife and I, we are selling our current primary residence. We’re moving into a new primary and instead of… I’m sorry. So context for our rookie audience, Sarah and I are moving out of our current primary into a new primary. And instead of selling the old house, we’re turning it into a rental. The majority of our portfolio has always been short-term rentals. We had a few long-term rentals when we first started. When in terms of buy and hold, it’s been mostly short-term, which we know really, really well. But long-term rentals we don’t know as well because even when we had them, I had a property manager running them for us. So I need a crash course right now on how to be a really good, or at least as good as you are, long-term rental landlord and property manager.
So I think the first thing that comes to mind for me, Ashley, is just getting the property ready. On a short-term rental perspective, I know exactly what we need to do in

Ashley:
Between guests. You got to go above and beyond and decorate and furnish.

Tony:
All those things. But for getting a long-term rental unit ready, what’s the punch list that you typically move through when one tenant moves out and before you get it ready to list to market for the next tenant?

Ashley:
Yeah. So first of all, it depends. If this is a brand new property that you just purchased and it’s vacant compared to if a tenant moved out because you’re going to want to do a move out inspection with them, document any of the damage they did. But we’re going to say this is just a new property that you bought. We’re not going to talk about all the destruction you personally did to the property living there. But first of all, touch up paint. So are there marks on the walls, things like that? Touch up paint. It will just –

Tony:
So you’re only doing touch up. You’re not repainting the entire interior.

Ashley:
I mean, I’ve been in your house and I do not think that it needs a whole repaint job. No. If you have the paint color, you can take a chip of it. I would touch up paint. Then the next thing is, is there anything that actually needs to be repaired or fixed? So is there things that you have dealt with and lived with because it was your house, it’s like that saying the shoemaker’s kids never have shoes or whatever it is because he’s always busy making shoes for other people that are paying customers so his own kids don’t even have shoes. So it’s like you’re so busy with your other properties that you don’t have time for your own home, which is very true with me also. So I think it’s very hard to say if these are the things you must do, but to make it rent ready, it also depends on your market.
So are there things that are expectations in your market? So your washer and dryer, are you taking your washer and dryer with you? Are you taking your appliances or are you going to leave them? Because you’ll need to, most likely in your market, need to get new appliances unless the comps show that you don’t need appliances because no other rental offers appliances.

Tony:
Well, the good thing is that we can answer that question right now because I actually don’t know. We haven’t thought about appliances yet to even answer that question for you. But I think our initial thought process was that we were just going to take those with us because we want to make sure that we just didn’t want to have to buy new appliances, but you’re absolutely right. If all of the other comps in our area are offering them, then it’s probably something

Ashley:
That we – I mean, that’s a huge expense for somebody to go out, rent an apartment and then have to buy three to $5,000 in appliances to put in there. That might be too much for somebody in a rental. So yeah, that would probably be one of the big things I’d think about. And then just safety. Is there anything like, did you take any handrails down off your stairs that need to be put back up? Is there a window that doesn’t have a screen or something that someone could fall out of? A lot of safety things I would go through and say, “Well, what’s somebody going to sue me for? What’s a liability here? Is there a broken step that goes out your front door that you just lived with?” So things like that I would really go through your property for. All

Tony:
Right. I’m looking through some of the other properties in – That are for rent. That are for rent in our neighborhood. I do see –

Ashley:
I’m going to say that I would think not even – Most of them. Yeah, not even looking. I would think in your area that appliances are pretty standard.

Tony:
Yeah. I see a fridge in that one, which we were planning to keep for ourselves is take our fridge. I guess I’m getting a new fridge. I don’t see washer and dryer in this specific listing, but let me grab one more here.

Ashley:
That would be one thing that would be the appliance that I would say that would be left out. If there was going to be one that somebody had to supply would be that.

Tony:
Oh, okay. Oh yeah, because I’m looking at theirs and here’s their laundry room and there is no washer and dryer. So you’re saying leave the fridge.

Ashley:
Yep. The oven. Oh

Tony:
Yeah. Oven. Yeah.

Ashley:
Dishwasher.

Tony:
Yeah, all those appliances, but I can probably take my washer and dryer.

Ashley:
Yeah.

Tony:
And

Ashley:
That comp I think just shows that too there. Plus then you don’t have to maintain the washer and dryer. So what we do in a lot of our small apartments is we have them there, but we don’t maintain them or replace them. So that way we don’t want the maintenance issue of somebody calling and saying the fridge broke. I have $200 worth of food. I need somebody out here right now to fix it. But we have them in there as a courtesy, but I don’t want the headache of having to maintain them or replace them. Got it. And if at some time during their tenancy they have to replace it, then you pay 50 bucks or whatever to have Lowe’s take your old fridge or whatever and they put their new one in there, then we add an addendum to the lease that they own that fridge and that’s their fridge and they’ll take it with them.

Tony:
Okay. I think that’s solved. We’ll probably end up taking the washer and dryer with us, we’ll leave the fridge. Now in terms of the other parts of the house, are you always freshly snaking the drains before the new person comes in or servicing the HVAC or the water heater before? Are you doing a full reset on everything or only the things that have given you issues?

Ashley:
That’s a great idea to do that stuff. So probably should do all of those full turnover. But no, we do not unless there is usually a problem, then we fix it. But the HVAC replace the filters, but usually we make the tenants do that. So that should be done all the time anyways. But yeah, that would be a great idea to go through and sneak your drains because we do put in the lease in a lot of them is that any drains that clog, because what’s everyone’s nightmare? The toilet is plugged at 3:00 AM and I got a call from my tenant. Within the first, I think it’s 60 days or something, we will put in there that we will take care of or be responsible for any clogs in the drains because you have just taken over that property and it could be from the previous tenant, whatever it was in there.
But anything past that, that’s from you. That’s grease, that’s hair. We’ve literally had someone put a beer can down there before, had to have the camera go down and everything and it’s a crushed beer can. So after that point, unless it’s a small multifamily where there’s multiple units and then it’s all connecting into one drain, you really can’t do this. But in a single family home, this works well.

Tony:
So I feel like I have a good sense on what the punch list is for us right now once we move out. But as you think about marketing the property, this is one of the debates that me and Sarah were having is at what point do you start marketing it? So are you waiting until all of that work is complete and then you’re going through and taking your photos? Or for us, we live there right now so we can take photos right now with all of our stuff in there and start marketing it now. But I’m telling her, I feel like we should wait until we get everything out so people can visualize the space. So what’s your recommendation?

Ashley:
See, that’s a hard one because it’s been a long time since I’ve had to wait because I keep my pictures. So I just listed a unit before somebody moved out, but it was the pictures that I’ve had forever and the property has stayed the same. So I just reuse the same photos. So I have them without their stuff in it and then list it. But I do put in there that showings won’t happen until X date. So what you could do is you could still put the pictures up with all your stuff in it and I would also look at the comps. Do the comp show – It’s

Tony:
A mix.

Ashley:
Yeah. So there’s a mix of it. So I would list it to gauge interest, start getting your leads, but I would put in the listing showings will not, it’s currently occupied, showings will not start until X date. So then you’re at least generating your list of leads. So I use TurboTenant and in TurboTenant, you can do your whole listing in there, you post it and then people can inquire and there’s different things that they can do. They can fill out a pre-screener, but once they’ve put their information, usually their name, phone number, email as a lead, you can do certain things. You can send them the link to the application, you can send them a pre-screener, which is basically just like if your house is going to be no smoking, do you smoke? And if they say yes, then okay, you don’t even pre-qualify for apartment because it’s non-smoking.
Then whatever your rent to income criteria is, your credit score criteria, and then you can also send them a link to set up a showing. So with the showing, you set your availability. So you could say on September 20th from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM, I’m going to let people book a showing. So as you get these leads, you can start sending them the showing invites and they can select a time. So you get your calendar booked of when you want to do showings and then you will already have people in advance to start seeing it right when you have it ready.

Tony:
So let me ask a few follow up questions. I want to talk more about the showing piece, but do you typically or would you recommend that we get professional photos taken? Because we can just walk around with our iPhone photos, which some of these listings are. Or we could get the professional photos. Have you seen a difference in speed to rent? I think

Ashley:
If you have enough nice cameras looking around in the studio that you could take your own professional photos very nicely. But in my market, nobody does professional photos for rentals. Nobody. Even for real estate agents, it’s half and half. My agent does professional photos every single time, but it’s still a mix. So again, look at your market, but I think –

Tony:
Yeah. See, I’ll send these photos so we can put them up on the screen, but these ones are clearly professional photos that were taken. So I’m like, okay, if I want to rent quickly like that one, then maybe we need to do… So I can probably maybe wing it myself a little bit of AI help to make

Ashley:
It professional. Yeah, you might as well try. Yeah, with AI it’s easy.

Tony:
Yeah, we can reorg. Let the sunset out

Ashley:
The window.

Tony:
So we’ll keep it clean. Okay, cool. So it sounds like what you’re saying is we should probably just list it now, get some good photos with the current space so we can start gauging interest and start building that list. Okay, cool. So Sarah won that argument. She’s not here to know that. Okay. So once we have the listing up, TurboTenant, we’re also going to use, you’ve spoken really highly about TurboTenant, so I’m excited to get into that software. Where are they actually… Where’s all the places that that is being distributed? Is it Zillow? There’s

Ashley:
20 of them. They don’t do it on Zillow. Zillow’s very weird now where I think, I don’t know what they did, but I think they try and keep just their- Their ecosystem. Listings on theirs. So I haven’t seen any other software recently that pushes out to Zillow anymore. So you could do a separate listing. I tried that out recently where I put it on TurboTenant. TurboTenant I think pushes out to 17 or 20 different websites like apartments.com. Even goes to Craigslist. I actually get a lot of leads from Craigslist, which I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet. But yeah, so it pushes it all. So you fill out one form and it walks you step by step through the process of do you accept pets? Describe your listing. How many bedrooms? Do you have a washer and dryer hookup?
It walks you through, makes it super easy to give all the information you need to know for the listing, and then it’ll push it out to all those websites for you.
I recently tested Zillow recently and it was, I would have to say after using TurboTenant, it was an awful experience to get the listing set up and then to publish, but then to manage the leads. So the leads were coming in and there wasn’t a way I could… In TurboTenant, I can mass invite. So if I get 10 leads for the day, at the end of the day, I’ll go in, I’ll select them all, and then I’ll send a mass showing invite. In Zillow, there was not a way to do that. I had to individually go in. I had to individually message each of them when I decided to host open house. So it wasn’t as friendly and I didn’t like it, but it did give me more exposure, I guess.

Tony:
Zillow, if you’re listening, you guys got a separate game and make it easier for us landlords to do the mass action. Okay, so we post it on TurboTenant, we go to Zillow. As these leads start coming in, because you talk about sometimes doing individual showings, I’ve heard you mention open houses before. How do you determine when you do one versus the other?

Ashley:
Yeah. TurboTenant has it set up 15-minute windows, or you can select if you want someone to have a longer showing, you can do it longer. I do it 15-minute intervals. So I put the availability and then people book. You can fill out a showing instructions. So like, okay, you’re going to come to the front door on the left or park in this parking lot or whatever instructions they need to actually get to you while you’re doing the showing. And then they get a showing reminder, everything like that. I got so much interest in a property I recently put on there that all the 15-minute time slots filled up. And I decided that I would just take one of those one-hour blocks and I messaged everybody that had been a lead and I said, “On this day, from this time to this time, we’re going to be hosting an open house because of all of the interest.
If you already have a showing scheduled, you can decide to come to the open house or you can cancel your showing or you can keep your showing and we’re still going to honor it and you can still come to it or whatever.” So as many leads as you get, we had 70 leads for this property over, I don’t know, three day time period. And I don’t know, probably over the three days we had showings, maybe not even 10 of them showed up. So even though people book a showing, doesn’t mean they’re actually going to come. So an open house also reduces that, that if people don’t come, at least you’re getting some people to come. Gotcha. I don’t want to waste five hours during my week sitting in open houses.

Tony:
Do you double book people? Can you do that?

Ashley:
Not in TurboTenant, no, you can’t. But when I was using Zillow, I opened up the same window, so I was double booking using the two different where two people were getting the same time slot.

Tony:
Now say it is an actual appointment. Someone shows up, you open the door. Are you letting them roam freely? Are you doing the realtor tour or pointing things out? What’s your approach for people?

Ashley:
I’m laughing because Daryl’s sitting right over there and does all of them for me now. So I’m like, I can’t even lie and say that this is what I do because I haven’t done one in so long. But what I would do or I have done in the past is they come in and I leave them alone. I will sometimes print out a flyer. TurboTenant makes a flyer you can print and hands them information. But usually I just say, “My name is Ashley. Please feel free to take a look around. Let me know if you have any questions.” And I just let them go and I stay there. I, first of all, don’t like small talk anyways, and I’m not going to sell the unit like, “Oh my God, look at this beautiful window you could look out at and stuff.” So I know what I would like and I would like to just be left alone to look around and snoop around and see if I like it.

Tony:
Gotcha. Okay. So you’re not like… I was a leasing agent. I’ve mentioned this a few times before.

Ashley:
So you got to tell me how it’s actually done.

Tony:
Well, I mean, I was only there for eight weeks before I quit, so I don’t have a whole ton of experience, but it was a sales job, right? So we had to make sure that we were closing people, but I’m just curious what’s worked well for you. Okay. So we’ll do the showings. We’ll bring people in. Once I have my pool of candidates, how do I go from pool of people who’ve done the viewing, they like the property, what’s my next step? Am I sending applications out to everyone who’s interested? I know part of this gets California specific, right? Right. So we’ll add that caveat there, but just walk me through your process. After the showings, what are you doing next?

Ashley:
Yeah, so the day of the first showings, I always send everyone the application at the same time. So no matter if they have a showing whatever day, I’m sending them out to every lead that day. Everybody’s getting the application same time. I send those out and then we do the showings and then the applications come in. Some people will fill it out right away without even seeing the place. And that kind of annoys me because then I go through the process of screening them and then they cancel their showing and don’t even come or they look at it and they’re not interested anymore. So I try and keep the applications as close to the showings as possible to eliminate that extra work.

Tony:
Could you just wait to send the application until after like, “Hey, you have to walk the property to get the

Ashley:
Application?” Yeah, you could. But yeah, I just…

Tony:
Just to get as many applicants as possible. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay.

Ashley:
And then in New York State, you have to go in order of received. So I’m assuming that’s probably why a lot of people probably just submit it anyways or whatever. But then I go through the application process and go one by one. So TurboTenant’s super easy because they literally give you a checklist and they do an income verification report for you. They do the background check, the credit check. I always look at the documents they attach, so picture ID, payroll stubs, bank statements, proof of funds, things like that. I always manually look at it because I had somebody once submit fake pay stubs to me. I always double check now the company, the address, does the payroll taxes amount actually match what they’re being paid? So now I super analyze

Tony:
Those. I got to imagine it’s probably even harder or harder for landlords, but easier for tenants with everything with AI, right? You

Ashley:
Could probably AI a fake license because it’s just the photocopy you’re getting or a picture of it even. Yeah, I do worry about that.

Tony:
Okay. So you start screening everyone. Yep. And then how do you actually get to the point where you’re saying, “Yes, this is the person that I want to come live in my place.”

Ashley:
So once I’ve decided they meet the criteria, so I keep a specific criteria and I put that right into my listing so it’s very clear to everyone, this is what I do. A lot of times I do now is three and a half times the rent as your income. Really? Yep.

Tony:
Man, I wonder… Let me pause there because I’m curious if any of these other places are stating that directly in it. I don’t see anything on this one. I feel like three and a half would be tough in SoCal where we are at. No one’s mentioning anything about that, at least in these listings. Do you see other properties in your area that also have that

Ashley:
Reaction? So my primary that I moved out of that I tried to rent, I did three and a half and I got no interest. I got no applications. Interesting. And that was part of not the only reason, but part of the reason that I decided to sell it instead of renting it because New York landlord laws are so tough. I did an eviction. I filed it May 14th and the guy just got evicted a week ago, September 3rd, I think it was or something. So I don’t want to be stuck with a tenant in this house where it’s an expensive rental compared to my other ones where it’s a way bigger mortgage payment I would have to float if somebody lived there and didn’t pay rent. So I wanted very high criteria and I could not get anyone. I think I was doing 2,700 a month in rent or 2,800 and there is nobody that…
There was I think two people, but their income wasn’t even close to meeting that requirement. But my other ones are 600 to $1,000 a month where it’s easier to hit that. To cover that.

Tony:
Gotcha. Okay. So you start going through, you’re filtering out the people that don’t meet the right requirements. And then when you find the right person, what are you doing then? It’s like the Willy Wonka golden ticket. You’re reaching out to them and saying, “Hey, you’re the winner.” What is that process?

Ashley:
I used to do, and you should do this, is I used to do a hold deposit. TurboTenant doesn’t have a feature to do this where when I used to use AppFolio, when me and my partner had a huge portfolio, you just push a button and would charge someone $200 for their hold deposit, and then that would be taken off their security deposit.
TurboTenant doesn’t have a way to do that. I could manually go in, add the $200, and then they have to pay the whole deposit. But with these, I haven’t had a lot of vacancies in the last couple years, so I’ve just had three in the past couple months, and the turnarounds were so quick with when they were moving in that I didn’t charge a hold deposit on these ones. But I do recommend is getting the hold deposit. So I message them through TurboTenant. I like to keep as much communication in writing as possible. I never talk to my tenants on the phone ever. So I message and I say, “Hi, we’ve reviewed your application. It has been accepted. Here’s how we move forward if you are interested in it.” I give them 24 hours to put a hold deposit in and then to sign the lease agreement, and then I tell them what the next steps are.
In the application, I ask for their move-in date, so I already have a bunch of the information I need to do their lease agreement. So you’ll want to double check that. Do they have pets? Are they paying extra for the pet? You need to add that into the lease. What’s their move-in date? When’s the lease going to expire? Is it going to be one year? All these things. TurboTenant also has a lease form that walks you through. BiggerPockets has their leases created by an attorney. So there’s lots of places you can get lease agreements that are templates, but also state specific. State specific. But you can use those. But then I message and say, “You’ve been accepted. Here are the next steps,” like setting up the utilities in their name for their move-in date, things like that. And then I set the expectation of move-in date, and I give them three different dates to get the keys, days and time.
So even though their lease is starting September 15th, if that’s a Monday, I may let them move in on Friday so they have the weekend where I meet them to get the keys or whatever. So I say, “You just need to pay your security deposit and your first month’s rent before you get the keys. Add to move in, you’ll do a walkthrough inspection of the property.” And I send all of that in my first initial message.

Tony:
So once you have that, super logistical question, but I know when I was a leasing agent, we took security deposit, first month’s rent, and then when the first came around, it was prorated for however many days they were in the unit that month. Do you follow that same process?

Ashley:
Yeah. And there’s literally a button in TurboTenant where you can select that as to this is their move-in date and I’m prorating rent. Got

Tony:
It, got it. Okay. And then once they actually pick up their keys, what does your inspection on the initial walkthrough look like?

Ashley:
Again, I don’t do that. Actually, I started using a feature in TurboTenant where actually they can do their own inspection. So I give them, depending what… If they get the keys on a Friday, I’ll give them to Monday or I’ll give them 48 hours or whatever. But they’ll get the key and then they can go through and they actually document itself, take pictures and things like that. We already have pictures from when they moved out or from when we listed it. We take new pictures or whatever if we need to. And so we already have our kind of pictures of everything, but then we have them go through. And I used to be the person that would walk through and say, “Okay, let me know what you see. Is this anything you think that you would be charged for?” And it was very minimal stuff, which you would want to say, “Oh, that’s better for you as the landlord.
You don’t want them to point out a lot of things.” I would rather them be more thorough instead of causing arguments or disputes down the road. So I just moved in a guy and he went through and literally every little tiny thing you could imagine, he notated on there, but he took a picture, he wrote exactly where it was, and it’s this great form they fill out where it just goes room by room. And

Tony:
It’ through

Ashley:
Turbotenet. Yeah. But a lot of, I think, software has it, property management software that you can do these. But what I used to do before property management software was amazing. I literally just had a checklist and it would be room by room, and it would say living room, flooring, windows, window coverings, walls, lights, fixture, and then a line, and that was it. And then the person would just notate what they… Well, I would do it with them, walk around and I would notate like, “Oh, there’s a mark on the wall on the left side of the living room,” or something like that. So

Tony:
It’s all captured through there. And then you do the inverse when they’re moving out also through TurboTenant? Do they have

Ashley:
A – So the move out, Daryl actually does with them. So when he goes to collect the keys from them, he walks through and lets them know right then and there what they would be charged. In New York State, you have to give someone the option for a pre-move out inspection. So that’s always offered to them first as if they want someone to come two weeks before so they have the opportunity to fix it. So we give them the option, they can accept or decline. Most decline it unless they already know there’s a big issue that they’re going to be charged for.

Tony:
Now I’ve got the person we did our walkthrough. Just give me the… Because we talk about this a lot, that the lease becomes the referee for any disagreements between the tenant and the landlord. What are some must-haves?

Ashley:
First of all, a lease means nothing in New York State anymore. You have no leg to stand on as a landlord. It’s not like if a tenant violates anything, you can even evict them because they violated in New York. But must-haves are who is responsible for what? Utilities, the appliances, any common areas, any landscaping, mowing the lawn, the snow removal, but you don’t have to worry about that. But is there any kind of maintenance or cleaning you want them to take care of? Well,

Tony:
Let me ask, what is reasonable for the landlord to put on the tenant? Because I can’t necessarily see through the other listings that are for rent, what the landlords are requiring of the tenant without seeing their lease. So just generally speaking, what kind of things am I able to ask the tenant to take care of given that this is a traditional single family

Ashley:
Home? And see, those should be in the listing as in they’re responsible for the lawn care or if you pay for a service to come and take care of the lawn care every month, if that’s included or not, because that does play a big factor. Those little things can add up for the tenant if they don’t know that ahead of time. But I think for a single family home, you can ask for a lot more. So you can ask for them to completely take care of the property. If there are things that you know that you want done, like cleaning out the gutters, do you guys even have gutters here? I don’t know.
Cleaning the leaves out of the gutters. If that’s not done, that’s just going to ruin your property. So maybe that’s something you want to have someone come every fall and clean out the gutters or spring or whatever. But I think that it’s a single family home. It’s way more reasonable to ask them to treat it like their own home and take care of and maintain everything. As far as repairs though, you should be responsible for things like that. But maintenance and cleaning, and Daryl runs into this a lot more than I do, but some of the apartment complexes, people mistake the word for that the stove has grease in it, as in the stove is smoking, it’s broken. But no, it’s because you have grease covered in the bottom of your oven from not cleaning it. That is why it is smoking. So making that distinction too sometimes can be difficult.

Tony:
Okay. Do you think I can do this on my own?

Ashley:
Probably not. That’s why you have Sarah to help you do this. I can already picture Sarah at the showings and she is going to be phenomenal at selling that place to

Tony:
Rent. I hope so. Oh Ash, this has been super helpful. Like I said, obviously we’ve had long-term rental experience, but we always had a property manager and we self-manage everything on the short-term rental side, but this is just a slightly different way of operating. So it’s helpful to get the insights from someone who’s done it before.

Ashley:
You texted me a couple weeks ago to send you a copy of a lease agreement. Did you read that yet?

Tony:
No, no,

Ashley:
No. See, you can only help someone so much if they’re not willing to take the information you give to them and consume it.

Tony:
Yeah. What is it? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Well, thank you, Ash. I feel much more prepared to step into this new phase of being a real estate investor, which is self-managing my own long-term rental, which is going to be literally around the corner from my house. I guess let me ask you, that’s the last thing, but should I let them know that I’m so close? I mean,

Ashley:
I’ve changed opinions over the years and for a while I was like, I do not want anyone to know I own this or be involved or anything. But now I feel like it’s easier because they know I’m just a person. I’m not some company, I’m not a property management company, but I don’t think you need to say you live just right around the corner. But it also really depends on the person.

Tony:
That’s

Ashley:
True. You’ll probably know within the first week of having them as a tenant, what type of tenant they are. If they’re already calling and saying like, “Oh, we decided we wanted to paint. Can you come over and paint?”

Tony:
Have you ever given a personality test to your tenants? Can you do that?

Ashley:
Is that violating fair helping out? Is that

Tony:
Legal? I don’t know. Someone help me out here. If

Ashley:
You’re house hacking and it’s your own primary residence – That’s true.

Tony:
There you go. There you go. All right. Maybe no personality test. We’ll pass on that one.

Ashley:
Well, thank you guys so much for joining us. I can only give so much information in my small limited but mighty portfolio as Chad Carson would say. So if you have advice for Tony, make sure to leave it in the comments of this YouTube video to help him get started on his new long-term rental journey. I’m Ashley, he’s Tony and we’ll see you guys next time.