Excerpts From Basic Mind-Reading Report 101 for Landlords

The following article is excerpted from an article written by Dan Auito, author of Magic Bullets in Real Estate. It appeared on The Landlord Protection Agency Website which can be found at www.thelpa.com. There are many great free articles which provide advice to landlords on this website and we recommend that landlords pay it a visit sometime.

It goes without saying but I will say it anyway. The better you understand your tenants and their personal situation, the better you can serve their needs and your own. Notice that your needs come after your tenants. Always put your tenants’ needs before your own and they will buy real estate for you in return. That’s a fair trade. Take it!

Tenants, believe it or not, are human beings. They are not animals or things to be mistreated, abused or taken advantage of. If you will prepare your rentals as if your mother was going to be moving in, your mindset would be realigned in short order. In effect, you will start looking at it from a compassionate point of view. You will not cut corners. You won’t let things go that need fixing. You will use more care, skill and diligence in preparing that dwelling for another decent human being to begin calling home. You want to provide a trouble-free, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing, creature comfortable, needs fulfilling, safe, secure, affordable and convenient place to live. When you provide those things and screen the population, it’s like striking gold!

The process of getting good tenants begins in your mind. By that, I mean you have to educate yourself to be able to recognize value and acquire properties that are structurally sound, aesthetically pleasing, physically functional and provide safety, security, affordability, convenience and a feeling of pride in your tenants’ mind. Now apply that to every property that you evaluate as a potential rental property investment. Human nature is immutable. We all have basic needs, wants, desires and expectations that include fear. When you remove fear and provide comfort and security, you will own your market. So what you have to do first before you can be a great landlord is to find great places to rent to other people. I fully explain that process in the book you can find at www.magicbullets.com, so I won’t do it here.

The following observations are done after you have already performed the formal screening procedures. I’m rushing you up to the day that your face-to-face meeting occurs with the tenants who have passed your telephone interviews and have succeeded in getting an appointment with you to see your wonderful rental. Now, here are some things that you uneducated dummy-type landlords can begin to recognize, plan for or evaluate when it does appear before their very eyes.

As soon as the potential renter shows up to view your property, take note of the time. Are they on time? Can they keep their first promise to you? Can they follow directions? If they’re late, did they get lost? I’m sure you gave good directions. If they can’t follow simple directions, will they be able to follow the lease agreement? OK, they showed up on time. This says they respect your time, are able to follow directions and are serious about finding a nice place to live. How did they arrive? Preferably they arrived in a clean, well kept passenger car that is in a clean condition. So the car looks OK on the outside but how about the interior of the car? Do they smoke and have smashed down McDonald’s bags pushed so far into the floorboards that in now resembles the carpet? Does this vehicle look like a home on wheels, with garbage bags filled with clothes, a crying baby and a cat in the back window? Watch out if you see this type of telltale evidence. I don’t think I need to paint the picture further of what will result if you miss this investigative step.

The bottom line here is people will generally treat your property the way they treat their own, if you’re lucky. So see how they’ve done with their own stuff up to this point and choose wisely based on intuition, gut-feeling and physical evidence. So the car inspection is over. How are the appearances of the folks? Are they clean and well groomed? Do they seem to fit the profile of what you expect from good tenants? If you get an uneasy feeling within the first few minutes of meeting these people, don’t brush it off as just some crazy thought. That’s your self-preservation instinct operating and you need to listen to it.

Have you noticed something about the process here? There has been no mention of race, religion, national origin, sex, age or marital status. That is discrimination based on federally protected human rights and it’s against the law to discriminate on that basis. This also includes the handicapped. My point is this: If they meet all the criteria that makes for a good quality tenant, than you would be ruling out a potentially excellent long-term tenant based on preconceived notions and that is dummy landlording in the first degree! So don’t discriminate on these basic human rights issues.

With the way I approach real estate, it is a 100% guarantee every single time that I am going to outsmart, outwit, outperform, over deliver and under promise to the point that I crush my competition. I am in a league of my own. My tenants are the winners and they know it, too. What kind of loyalty do you think develops in the minds of people that look to me for protection? It stands as a testimony and irrefutable, self-evident, empirical fact that I care enough about the people who have entrusted me with their welfare, their time, their money and their trust to deliver on my promises. And remember the Landlord’s Creed: I vow never to rent to someone else, something that I myself would not be happy living in.

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