No one enjoys the eviction process. Both tenants and landlords find evictions difficult, time consuming and expensive, and that’s why we do whatever we can to avoid them. Today we are sharing some of the practices we have in place to limit the number of evictions we have to do.
Rent Collection
The most important thing you can do is to have a consistent system in place for collecting rents. Tenants will quickly learn how serious you are about having rent paid on time when you are consistent and disciplined. If you are lacking a system that includes late notices and late charges, your St. Joseph tenants will learn what they can ride out and get away with. If the first of the month comes and you don’t have a great collection routine set up, tenants will have no reason to pay promptly. If they know that you’re going to wait a couple of weeks before you call or send a late notice, they’ll take their time paying.
We recommend that you send a late notice after rent is four days late. We also recommend that you apply a late fee. You can email the notice that rent is late and both the rental payment and the late fee are due immediately. If you still don’t get your rent, serve a 7 Day Notice, which is called a Demand for Possession in Michigan. Once they receive that notice, the tenants have seven days to pay rent or move out of the rental property. We apply an additional fee when we have to serve that legal notice.
As we go through the process at Real Property Management, tenants understand that if they don’t pay their rent on time, it’s going to get more expensive for them. They also learn that we are serious with our collection policies. Typically we have very few evictions and I think that’s because we’re serious about collecting rent. We don’t get personal. We don’t recommend knocking on doors because that can be dangerous for everyone.
If you have any questions about eviction best practices or you’d like to learn more, please contact us at Real Property Management Southwest Michigan, and we will be happy to help you.