Trees, bees, and water leaks
When people find out we are landlords, the first comment is usually something like … “how do you deal with all the nightmare issues?”
But that really hasn’t been our experience at all, and it’s only gotten easier as we’ve scaled up. Being a landlord isn’t easy, but it really shouldn’t be a nightmare.
My wife and I handle all the management of our properties ourselves — we don’t have a third-party management company (yet). We’ve made a lot of mistakes and learned many lessons, but have found that good communication and being generally reasonable helps resolve about 80% of all issues.
Many of the issues aren’t really the tenants’ fault and often aren’t really our fault either, but they are our responsibility to fix.
Trees
Living in Tallahassee, one of the biggest challenges are trees. They’re everywhere.
When storms come through or the ground gets soaked, they have a habit of falling down.
We’ve unfortunately dealt with this many times.
These two trees fell during a storm and tangled themselves in another tree. To make matters worse, the tenant never let us know. They had been down over a week before we drove by and noticed.
Here’s one where the tree didn’t come down, but one of the large branches did. This particular branch really stuck the landing and nearly came through the ceiling of the bedroom below.
We ended up replacing the whole roof shortly after this.
At a different property, one of our neighbors had a large pine tree that blew over during a bad storm, but didn’t completely fall. The issue was that it was leaning over our property.
We reached out to the owner and they said they would “look into it.” A few days later it fell and destroyed part of our fence. The owner never paid, but we ended up buying their townhouse from them for a great price a few years later. So I guess it all worked out.
Bees
This has to be one of the strangest issues we’ve ever dealt with.
We once had a tenant tell us they heard “humming” in the ceiling. When we opened it up, this is what we found.
Turns out there was a massive bee hive in the ceiling — literally thousands of bees. They also weren’t thrilled that we opened their space.
If you want to see a video (I recommend keeping the sound on), you can check it out here.
I still have no idea how it got this big without anyone noticing. Fortunately, we found a beekeeper who happily and safely removed them for free (he was thrilled to keep the bees).
Water Leaks
Finally, the dreaded water leaks. These are the ones that can quickly cost a fortune if you’re not careful.
We’ve had water leaks that flooded a bedroom, leaks from a hot water heater on the second floor (I have words for the builder who made that design call…), and even leaks that came from an adjacent property. Over the years, we’ve had thousands of dollars worth of damage.
Sometimes the leaks are small and outside, which don’t disturb the residents or damage property. This leak was a pain to deal with, but ultimately was fixed pretty quickly.
Other times, the leaks are much more significant and require extensive repair.
In this case, a leak at an adjacent property (that we didn’t own) ended up causing thousands of dollars to replace. We had to rip out flooring, remove drywall, and even replace furniture. It was a mess and ended up going on for several months before it was resolved.
Through all these issues, we’ve learned to roll with the punches.
It’s never fun, but with each problem that gets solved, the next one that much more manageable. We also have gotten much better at preventative maintenance, including removing trees and making sure there aren’t ways for bees to build a hive in our attic insulation.
At the end of the day, you live and you learn.
