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Wisconsin | There was a similar thread recently, generally we agreed that having somebody else manage it was a good plan for one house. If you're young, and with two, there's a little more incentive to do it yourself. And you never know how good a rental management agency you're going to find. You might have somebody two miles away that has a couple dozen local rentals that could make it work great, or it might be half an hour to a town with a real estate agent that does a few, poorly.
There's no magic bullet that will prevent trouble. If you do it yourself you have to present a clean property, with clear expectations, and be able to follow up. Have to know your state's landlord tenant law, and wouldn't hurt to sit in the local court house on eviction return day to see the process, worst case which you have to be prepared for. In general, the northern states have stronger consumer protection, so MN, WI, NY make it much harder to evict than TX. I don't know hot that applies to OH, but I bet it's not easy, the local judge can have an impact on how hard it is also.
The biggest thing is to use every available option to screen tenants, and wait as long as it takes to get a sane renter. If you go to marketplace you'll get overwhelmed with crazies, but that's how you'll get people to see it. Your rating is important also, they will hide your add if you have too many complaints, or take too long to reply, or say no to too many replies. The bigger companies make applicants pay to fill out an application on their own website, which does two things, it makes it extremely prohibitive for crappy tenants to apply to dozens of companies because they know they'll likely be rejected, and it moves them off facebook so they're not allowed to "rate you". The downside of that is if you're a stupid smaller landlord who prescreens on marketplace messenger, you'll be talking to vast swarms of terrible renters who know they don't have a chance with the smarter companies, and they're not happy about their situation either. | |
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Tell me about renting out a house.
