The thing about owning rental property is that you’re always on duty. It doesn’t matter if you’re on vacation, at your day job, or in bed getting a good night’s sleep. Unless you’ve got someone else you’re paying to answer the phone (you’re making more money than I am), then you’re on duty 24/7.
Now, I’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring my buildings are well maintained which means I don’t have a lot of maintenance problems. If there’s a problem, I like to fix it as quickly as I can. This can prevent my phone from ringing in the middle of the night. On Tuesday of this week, while I was out of town visiting my parents, I received a voice mail early in the morning informing me there was sewage backing up into the tub of a basement unit. This is seriously bad news.
A sewer back-up can cause major damage, if not addressed quickly. Normally, before I spend any money with a tradesman, I will go out and see if I can solve the problem myself. While this costs me time, it has most certainly saved me money in the past when I can solve the problem. In this case I was out of town, so I had no choice; call the plumber.
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Steve Maintenance & Repairs Plumber, Sewage
So things have been going very smoothly with the rental properties as of late. After putting in nearly a full summer of upgrades, repairs, and new tenants I have been rewarded with my cell phone sitting silently in my pocket. I’ve haven’t had an apartment related phone call in months.
That changed about two weeks ago when I got a call from a tenant informing me that her furnace wasn’t working and another call later in the day telling me there was a couple of inches of water on the floor of the utility room in my second building. I wasn’t too worried about the furnace issue, I simply called a furnace technician and sent him out. You see the furnaces in this building are fairly old so I’m not surprised when I have issues. But, I was worried about the water and there’s no one to call to solve that.
Now, I find I have to ask lots of questions when a tenant calls because they tend to think the sky is falling when something extraordinary comes up. In most cases I have to ask tenants ‘dumb’ questions like do you have oil in the tank, do you have your thermostat turned on, have you checked the radiators, etc. I learned this the hard way when I rushed out of work to check on a tenants heat only to find out it was actually on – just not as warm as she wanted it.
Fortunately my tenant with the furnace issue is surprisingly self-sufficient and will actually go out to the furnace room and push the reset button, bleed the furnace line and more on her own. So when she calls, I know something serious is up. With water on the floor, there’s no one to call and apparently it was up against the drywall of the basement apartment, so I had to sort it out fast.
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Steve Maintenance & Repairs Heating, Oil, Utilities
