Interviewer: Are there any common mistakes that a landlord make that land itself is in a staking situation in the first place? Glen Malia: Yes, the number 1 kind of mistake is not doing a good check, not putting the tenant through a good credit check, background check before letting the tenant in the property, you know. If you let a bad tenant in, you’re going to have a bad tenant. Many landlords might have a tenant familiar and they don’t want to have tenant sign the application, you know, that’s mistake no. 1. You always have the tenant fill that out a rental application, include the tenant’s name and address, social security number, authorization to the credit check, their employment, their present employer, their last employer, their present landlord and their prior landlord. You should always check with the prior landlord, not the present landlord because if it’s a bad tenant, the present landlord would tell you that they are great tenant because he wants them to move. The prior landlord will tell you all the bad stuff about the tenant. The Most Common Mistake Committed By Landlords is Not Screening a Tenant Thoroughly So, the mistake no. 1 landlords make is not having the tenant fill out an application and checking the credit, checking employment, checking rental history, you know. And then, another kind of mistake that the landlord will make is listening to the tenant’s excuses for not paying rent and being nice to the tenant, not treating his building as a business and the other tenant may -- the first month the tenant doesn’t pay the rent, you know, the landlord may, you know, listen to the sad story and maybe the tenant comes up with a third offer rent a couple hundred bucks as an excuse for not paying it. The next month, it’s the same money and then, you know, before the landlord pulls the trigger, the tenant may already owe a few thousand dollars, you know, and that money will never be received by the landlord because the landlords making this mistake, they don’t think about the fact that the reason the tenant is not paying the rent is because they don’t have the money to pay the rent and they’re never going to have the money to pay the rent and you should need to move ahead against the tenant as quick as possible when the tenant doesn’t pay the rent. Another Common Mistake Landlords Make is Not Having a Written Lease Another common mistake landlords make is, in my opinion, not having a written lease, you know, by having a written lease is you get yourself protected, you can buy more protection and things of that nature, put in rules and regulations, put in elements that makes it easier to start the eviction process, putting, I should say, clauses that makes it easier to start the eviction process. Trying to Evict a Tenant By Themselves is Another Mistake Detrimental to the Landlord The other big mistake the landlords make is when they decide to move ahead with the eviction process, they try to do things themselves at the very outset as opposed to bring a lawyer who knows what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, what the paperwork has to read, what is the rent demand or a 30 day notice, which called Notice of Termination, how that’s be given to the tenant and things of that nature because in New York, if the rent demand is not sufficient, if the notice of termination is not sufficient, the case will be dismissed. So, those are big mistakes that landlords made and there’s million mistakes that landlords make but those are the real big mistakes that many landlords make. |