As a landlord, you will always need to allocate money from rents received for maintenance – whether that’s unexpected small things like replacing a white good, or long-term maintenance costs like the upkeep of the roof for example. Making sure you allocate funds for maintenance costs will definitely help keep you from unexpected bills, and from our experience it also helps to budget for those works.
Top tip: short-cut solutions are never good, if you do have to do this while tenants are in residence, make sure you allow for the full job to be done as soon as you can.
Our main piece of advice from this article is to actually plan ahead for your maintenance costs – and this is something quite common with our landlords, who allocate budgets per year on rolling maintenance, that way hopefully making sure a big surprise maintenance job doesn’t rear its head.
Property Surveys
It might be too late if you have already purchased, but during the buying process make sure you carry out a homebuyers survey, so you can uncover any potentially costly issues straight away. You might be able to budget for them, and at least you will know what to expect.
Finding the right tenants
We aren’t painting every tenant with the same brush here, but when you do live in a property there is a certain level of upkeep you can do to make sure the property stays in good condition. You want tenants who will respect the property they live in – even something as simple as keeping the bins tidy and not attracting rodents for example. Finding the right tenants can be hard, and we always recommend using a letting agent to help you with this.
Carry out a full inventory
We wrote a blog on our website about inventories, and recently in an EGO too. An inventory is there to protect both you, the landlord, and the tenant. For you, it will help ensure that the property has been looked after – especially when it comes to those larger maintenance tasks such as flooring, ceilings, windows and the state of walls. Now, do expect tenants to make some natural wear and tear (we all do it), but it is a great way to keep a track of those maintenance tasks which will be upcoming.
Are you furnished, or unfurnished?
If you offer a property furnished, you will need to allow for this in your yearly budget too – mattresses do need replacing, furniture can break, white goods can become faulty. We’re not saying jump to unfurnished, but consider who your target market are and what they will require.
Get specialists involved
We have seen this many times with properties in Aberystwyth – damp. We always recommend getting specialists involved for anything you cannot easily rectify yourself – it will pay dividends in the end by allowing you to find the problem quickly, figure out the solution, how much it will cost and how long it will take to rectify. For issues like damp as a prime example – spending that bit more to do the job properly will mean hopefully no damp issues for a long time. Cutting corners, or using short cuts may result in the problem recurring often.