It doesn’t take much to turn an ordinary homeowner into a landlord. Maybe you have to move but want to keep your home and rent it out. Or you have a change of fortune — you get married, receive an inheritance or buy a new house before you unload the old one.
REALTOR® Beth Paisley of Winchester, VA advises that first you should consider how much effort you are willing to put in to be a landlord.
“While many people would love to have an extra house to worry about, owning even one rental property can be a headache. You have to tease the problem apart and ask yourself, among other things:
Is it worth hanging onto this property?
How will you feel about strangers moving into your beloved home?
Can you, a novice with a day job, turn a dime on a real-estate rental while avoiding the ‘tenants from hell’?
The answer to these questions depends partly on the place itself. Ideally, it is in good repair, in a safe part of town and the mortgage is cheap or paid off. The more your place departs from this ideal, the more closely you should look at selling if you can. That’s because, whatever your reason for holding and renting out a spare house — and there are many — it won’t work if you don’t treat it like a business.
Can you do it? Should you? The biggest criterion for whether you should even attempt this may be whether your temperament is suited to being a landlord.”
Click here to read more of Beth Paisley’s blog.
Realtors: Sign up for your own free Featured Blog on Realtor.com.
Get the Realty 3.0 RSS Feed and Follow us with you favorite RSS reader.