Sunday 28 October 2007

Rental Property Repairs

It's almost four months since the roof of our rental property was damaged by a falling tree. The insurance company took a couple of months to approve the repair quote from their builder, and then the builder wouldn't get started until we signed off on the list of work to be done and mailed a cheque for the $100 "excess". A week ago our tenant emailed to say that the repair work had finally commenced. Hopefully it will be completed this week - we had to agree to reduce the weekly rent from $400 to $300 until the rood repairs were done, so every extra delay in getting the repairs completed is costing us money. It was better to agree to the rent reduction than risk having the tenants moving out, as we couldn't have got any new tenants until the repairs were completed.

The outstanding repairs also make it impossible to do the annual rent review. The rent hasn't been increased for several years now, while Sydney rents have increased quite a lot. Although it's not worth raising the rent if it leads to a tenant moving out and not getting any rent while looking for new tenants, at some stage the gap between market rents and what we are charging makes it necessary to ask for a rent increase and hope for the best. If the repairs are completed soon I'll probably wait until the new year before sending the tenants a notice of rent increase.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007


No comments: