Repairing the damage done by the contractor enlisted to rennovate this place by the previous owner has been a convenient excuse to avoid looking for tenants. If half of the projects that have been redone or repaired were done after tenants had moved in, the resulting headaches would not have been worth it.

However, now that the work is nearly completed, things on the marketing and screening side have to be stepped up.

Acquiring the necessary paperwork.

The Landlord Protection Agency has provided good information in their Q&A forum, Free Forms page and their links to Landlord – Tenant Law most states. A one year membership to the site grants access to their form library, which contains editable forms that, from what I’ve read, should be on hand. After editing, having this looked over by my attorney should help out tremendously.

Additional Services.

I’ve been weighing whether or not to improve documentation of problems at the expense of making myself more available. Essentially what I’ve been considering is installing online trouble ticketing (help desk) software that would allow tenants to connect to one of my domains and, after entering in their username and password, fill out a webform detailing the problem that they are experiencing. As of now, I’ve been considering only open source solutions (as I’m not entirely sure what the return on a system like this would be).

• OS Ticket Support Ticket System that could be slightly modified for tenant related problems (instead of computer user related ones).
• MyHelpDesk is a free PHP/MySQL system that is designed for smaller organizations. I would just have to check with my webhost to ensure minimum requirements are met. Downside to this one is, you have to install it before you can see it (no screen shots). The upside is, others seem to be happy with it.