Real Estate Insurance New Jersey: Tips for New Landlords
One of the first and most important steps you can take as a new landlord is to ensure that you have the right real estate insurance coverage to protect your investment. Building good relationships with your tenants is often considered to be just as important.
Here are some tips for landlords to ensure good professional relationships with tenants, and to run a successful business.
Understand the Fair Housing Act: This Act prohibits landlords from using any of the following criteria when evaluating potential tenants: race, color, national heritage, religion, gender, disability, and familial status.
Know Your Tenant: Conducting a thorough background screening is imperative. This involves a credit check and checking references from past landlords.
Build a Solid Lease Agreement: There are many online sources to confide in how to write a lease agreement. Basically, all terms and expectations should be clearly defined.
Understand the Eviction Process: Ideally this would never happen, but unfortunately it does. So, it’s important to become familiar with this process and be ready to start the process immediately when a tenant violates the lease.
Devise a Moving in and Moving out Procedure: A helpful tool for this is a comprehensive walk-through checklist that you can use to walk through the rental unit with the tenant and document the condition of the unit.
Stay Capitalized: Set aside a good amount of cash specifically for rental expenses and any other unexpected costs such as tenants suddenly ceasing to pay rent, unexpected repairs, lawsuits, etc.
These are just a few of the ways to maintain good business relationships with your tenant while still keeping your bottom line in mind. At Provident Protection Plus Insurance Agency, we provide a comprehensive New Jersey business insurance portfolio for companies throughout Pennsylvania, northern New Jersey, and New York. Give our professionals a call toll-free at (888)990-0526.