12. Top 5 Mistakes New Landlords Make (And How to Avoid Them)

🎙️ Episode 12 of the Fort Worth Property Management Podcast covers the top five mistakes that new landlords make when renting out their property and how to avoid expensive problems before they happen.

Most landlords do not fail because they bought a bad property. They fail because they make emotional decisions instead of business decisions. In this episode, Mason Arispe breaks down the most common landlord mistakes he sees every week while working with self-managing landlords across Fort Worth and Tarrant County.

What you will learn in this episode:

• Why rental properties must be treated like a business
 • The importance of bringing your property up to Texas property code
 • Why overpricing your rental property creates costly vacancy
 • How being too lenient with rent payments can spiral out of control
 • Why renting to friends, family, or a friend of a friend is risky
 • The biggest mistake landlords make: never checking on the property
 • Why yearly inspections protect your investment
 • How emotional decision making hurts landlords financially
 • The systems and procedures professional landlords use to succeed

Mason also shares real-world examples from years of working with landlords who attempted to self-manage their rental properties before running into major issues with tenants, property damage, lease violations, and unpaid rent.

Behind Closed Doors Segment

This episode also includes updates on:

• Current Fort Worth rental market conditions
 • Rising rental prices heading into summer
 • Vacancy trends and seasonal demand
 • Why more homeowners are converting homes into rentals
 • Operational updates at First Choice Property Management

If you are a first-time landlord, accidental landlord, or homeowner thinking about renting out your property, this episode will help you avoid some of the most common and expensive mistakes in property management.

📊 Need help pricing your rental property?
 Visit https://fortworthpropertymanagement.com

📩 Questions about self-managing your rental?
 Email Mason at mason@1stchoicepm.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Howdy friends, welcome back to another episode of the Fort Worth Property Management Podcast. This is episode 12. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. Today we are going to talk about something that every investor experiences at some point, especially in the beginning. And I know it's going to be hard to believe, but even I have experienced this at one point or another, and that is mistakes. We're going to be talking about the top five mistakes that we see new landlords make whenever renting out their properties. And so it's going to be a great episode. I feel like every episode, I'm always talking about mistakes that could be potentially made. So this one we're going to sum up the top five so that you have one go-to podcast to make sure that you avoid all of these things and set yourself up to have a successful rental property. Let's get into it. All right, everybody. Welcome back to episode 12 of the Fort Worth Property Management Podcast. I am your host, Mason Rispey. I work with First Choice Property Management here in Fort Worth, Texas, and today's episode is going to cover the biggest mistakes that new landlords make. Here's the reality: most landlords they don't make mistakes because they chose a bad property. That does happen, don't get me wrong, but the vast majority don't fail because they chose a bad house or a bad rental property. Most landlords fail because they make an emotional decision instead of a business decision. When running a rental property, you have to have some sort of process and procedure and treat it like a business. If you treat everything emotionally, you're gonna set yourself up to fail. And honestly, that's very common in the beginning. A lot of new landlords have very emotional ties to this property. Maybe it's the first house that you purchased, you moved out and rented, maybe you inherited the property from a family member, or maybe you finally purchased your first rental property after years of watching YouTube videos and TikTok videos. All of those scenarios can create such an emotional connection to this property, and you want it to go so perfectly, but you make an emotional decision when it comes to renters, and that's where a lot of landlords end up failing. And once you get knee deep into rental properties, you can very quickly realize this is way more than I expected. In every episode that I film, I always include a little snippet of common mistakes that I see landlords make, and so I wanted to sum it all up into one go-to podcast that you can listen to to eliminate the chances of you actually making a mistake along the lease cycle. And so this is going to be the top five mistakes, in my opinion, that I see landlords make while renting out their property. We're going to start with mistake number five, which is kind of a smaller mistake, leading towards the number one mistake that I see when landlords reach out to our team. And so please stick around to the end. Before we jump into the main topic of today, we do want to start with our behind closed doors segment where we give you a little bit of a look into first choice property management and all of our daily operations here. So, first choice property management is currently managing 535 rental properties here in Fort Worth, Texas. It's a mix of single-family homes, duplexes, townhomes, stuff like that. We currently have 14 homes listed. We had a lot of listings throughout the month of May because homeowners know that summertime is right around the corner and that is the peak season. So their house is on the market. It's the perfect time to be listing right now. I will say we are in the midst of graduation season. So the last two weeks of May, they tend to slow down. And then when June hits, we're out to the races for summertime. So that is what we're preparing for now. We also have a lot of what we call make readies. Houses are getting cleaned, we're redoing the flower beds, and we're getting it ready for listing during the month of June. And so that's kind of where our focus is at right now. We are focusing more on executing and all the plans that we put together and less on the procedural for right now, since we are heading into busy season. The average rental price for a single family home in Fort Worth has jumped up to $2,065. It's up about $15 on average. This is normal. People know that they can be slightly more aggressive during summertime and tend to list a little bit higher and try for a higher rental price because there's a lot more demand. So we'll end up seeing if that average market rent holds steady. Something I am consistently seeing right now is that homeowners are calling in because they can't sell their house. So the sales market typically around this time tends to heat up as well, but it may not be a booming sales market. So we are still getting inventory transferring over from the sales market over to the rental market. And before we head into the episode, we do want to quick give a quick shout out to one of our spotlight listeners, Ricky. We appreciate you so much. Ricky left a comment on one of our previous videos. Uh, he reached out to me directly, and I met with him at his property here in North Fort Worth a few times. We're talking through a full-scale remodel right now. We're he's getting a bunch of work done, we're putting a new roof on, he is getting the house ready to be listed and has been doing his homework. He's listened to a bunch of the last episodes on what type of flooring, what type of paint, what time of fans and fixtures to put in, and is updating his house completely to get ready to place a good quality tier one renter into the house. And so we'll keep you updated on the status of Ricky's property, and then we will share the listing whenever it finally hits the market and it looks pristine. We'll share that with everybody as well. Ricky, thank you so much. Hope everything's going good, and we'll talk to you soon. All right. So now to jump into the main topic of today, the biggest mistakes that we see self-managing landlords make. So first I want to kind of establish why we're making this video. So my role here at First Choice is I I am the operations and the business development manager. So when homeowners want to sign up with us, it's my phone that rings, and I talk with each and every one of them. And so I hear the mistakes. I also hear the stress and worry in these people's voices whenever they're reaching out to me. And so here's what happens in any of the scenarios that I mentioned earlier, you have a property, it's empty, and your number one goal is to get a renter in there. Everything's so much easier when you have some rent coming in. And so there's a lot of mistakes that can happen whenever your main goal is just get a body in there and let's get some rent going in. And that's usually what a lot of new self-managing landlords focus on. They think it's as simple as putting a tenant in there, they're going to pay rent every month. And that's what leads to the mistakes, right? And then everything is a lot more emotional when there's no money coming in, when it's just getting somebody in there into the house. And so when you make the first mistake, they tend to compound overtime. They compound enough to where you're like, okay, I can't do this by myself. I need some help. And that's when you reach out to a management company, I'm the one who answers. And so I've heard these mistakes for the past four years. I've heard them all. And I think it's important to understand why new landlords struggle. Most landlords underestimate a few different key areas. They underestimate the risk, they underestimate tenants' behavior, they underestimate legal exposure, and they underestimate systems. If you if you don't account for all of those things, you can leave yourself very exposed when leasing your property. They think I own the property, I'll collect rent, the tenant will pay rent every month, and it'll all work itself out as long as I have some rent coming in. But rental properties are a business, they have to be treated as a business. So if you don't so if the business doesn't account for the risk, they're exposed. If the business doesn't do everything to protect its income, it's at risk. And if the business doesn't have set systems, it's exposed. And so you have to account for all of that. Rental properties are a business. Business requires systems. The landlords who succeed managing their own properties long term are the ones who stop the emotional decision making and start thinking more operationally. Property management companies are stuck in the operations. A property management company can't operate at a high level if they don't have successful operations. They just won't. There's too much going on. Okay, so let's jump right into the top five biggest mistakes that I see new landlords make when renting their property. Mistake number five: this is kind of a trivial one, but not bringing the home up to Texas property code standards. Most of you homeowners do not know. In the Texas property code, there's a specific section for rental properties. So when a new construction home builder builds a property, or when a homeowner purchased the house and lives in it, it does not have to abide by the Texas property code. You can do whatever you want with your house. They don't have to bring it up to code. However, the second you sign a lease, it is officially a rental property and it has to abide by the Texas property code. Now, here in Fort Worth, the city of Fort Worth does not send in an official inspector to verify, but there are plenty of suburbs of Fort Worth that do. City of Saginaw, the city of White Settlement, City of Hearst, the City of Watauga, and much more, they require that an inspector go and visit the property and make sure that it's up to Texas Property Code standard before you can even list the property. So if you jump ahead, sign a lease, and move a tenant in, you could be in violation of the Texas property code. I'm willing to bet money that seven out of ten landlords listening to this episode right now did not know that they have to bring it up to Texas Property Code standard. The vast majority of landlords don't know that they have to bring their property up to code. And then the other few that do know they have to bring it up to code, they may just not do it so that they can save some money. It cost a couple hundred bucks to do. And so those other ones might just want to save money, don't do the repairs and just move the tenant in. It becomes a huge liability because it directly affects the safety of the tenant living in that home. When you're living in the house yourself as the homeowner, you don't have to abide by any code, but you're now providing housing for another human being. So you have to be up to code. We're talking about things like smoke detectors in each room, making sure that your outlets are GFCIs, making sure that there are keyless deadbolts on every exterior door, making sure the water heater has a catch pan or is up on a stool. There's a bunch of different things that go into bringing your home up to code that homeowners just don't know about. And so mistake number five is landlords don't know that they have to bring their home up to code, and and it can expose a lot of liability in the long run if at some point that tenant is not safe in that house. And trust me, tenants expect a safe and functional property. And so if they move in and it's not that, they're gonna ask. They're gonna ask you to install some locks, they're gonna ask you to rekey the property. All of that has to be done correctly. And if something goes wrong, especially legally, lack of preparation and a lack of maintenance becomes very expensive. And so you definitely want to make sure that your rental property here in Texas is brought up to the Texas property code standard. All right, mistake number four overpricing the property on the market. This is a big one. This happens constantly. I can't tell you how many landlords call into our company, ask me to look at their property. They have a Zillow listing up. I look at the Zillow listing, and that house is $500 over the market standard in that neighborhood. And then sure enough, I scroll down, it's been on the market 60 days with zero saves and zero contacts. Nobody's reached out to them. They can't get anybody to come view the house. The price is too high. This happens constantly. Happens for two or three reasons. One, the most common one, my mortgage is that high. My mortgage is $2,500. So I assumed I can get $2,500 in rent. If I just break even, then this all makes sense. I'll rent my property if I can just break even on the mortgage. That's not how it works. Just because your mortgage is $2,500 doesn't mean that that's what it can bring in in rent. And so mortgages can lead to overpricing. A home can also get overpriced because a homeowner just spent a lot of money getting it ready to go. They had to get the paint, replace the carpet, get the cleaning. They said, you know what? I did all this stuff for the tenant. I'm gonna jack up the rent. All of those repairs really just got it back to its market condition. That's all it did. And so a lot of times we see overpricing. And then one of the most common things that I hear from homeowners is, well, my house is special. It has a water filtration system, it has solar panels, I put an outside generator on it. Well, all these things are great amenities while living in a home, those type of things don't add hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of rental value to the house. And so I I completely understand that your home is special, that you did all this work, that you updated all of the light switches to where they can be where there's smart switches and can be accessed through Wi-Fi, all of that stuff. I get it. That's all emotions. That's all it is. It's all emotions. You are looking inward to all the work that you did and are expecting the market to adhere to that feeling. That's an emotional decision instead of looking at data and looking at what other houses are renting for in the neighborhood. And so one of the biggest mistakes I see is that homeowners make an emotional decision, they overprice their home on the rental market, and then it sits for forever. The market doesn't care. A tenant is gonna see that your house is $500 more expensive than every other house in the neighborhood, and it's gonna go rent one of those houses, not yours. And so the reason that this is one of the biggest mistakes is because vacancy is the number one killer of cash. I mean, think about it. If your house sits empty for two months, you just made two months worth of mortgage payments. That's that's a lot of money. Whereas if you just price correctly, tenant pays rent in month one, you're fine. So the the market doesn't care. Your market price is not whatever you set it at. The market price is whatever somebody in the market's willing to pay for your house. And if you overprice that, then it's gonna sit on the market for a long time. And so you want to avoid this mistake at all costs. Run comps, shoot me an email, I'll run comps for you and just give them to you. You can reach out to a realtor, a realtor will give you comps pretty easily, but you don't want to outprice yourself in the market because you don't want this house sitting. Vacancy is expensive. Mistake number three that I see new landlords make is being way too lenient when it comes to rent payments. All right, so this is a big one. I can't tell you how many homeowners have called me and are just being way too lenient with their tenants. So let me start here. This mistake usually starts with good intentions. A tenant says, My mom got sick, my dog got sick, my car broke down, I just need a few extra days. And you, being the good, noble, gracious landlord at like you are, that's completely fine to be that way. You say that okay, completely understandable. It happens to all of us. That is great. I'm glad that is in your heart. But when it becomes a pattern is when it's a problem. Don't forget people will take advantage of that. We we say you give people an inch, they'll take a mile, okay? And so it is completely fine to be a self-managing landlord who is gracious to their tenants. Completely makes sense, but don't let them abuse it, okay? So, what typically happens is they have the excuse, my car broke down, whatever it is, and you give them a few extra days, they don't make a payment, you give them a few extra weeks, they don't make a payment, and then all of a sudden, we're at the next month. They now have two rent payments, too. And then on the first, maybe they make a rent payment, maybe they don't. And if they do make a rent payment, they're a month behind. They missed, they completely missed that first month. And so that's what we want to avoid. So, in that specific scenario, what you want to do to avoid this mistake is create a payment plan, just like any other vendor would, any other business would create a dated payment plan. If they give you the excuse, say, hey, I completely understand it happens, that happened to me last year, right? What day can you pay? The tenant's gonna tell you, I get paid on Friday the 7th, whatever it is. Okay, great. Make your payment on Friday the 7th by the end of the day, no hard feelings, or you can even break it up, make half your payment this day, half your payment this day, but give them a dated plan and make it formal. Send them an email afterwards saying, hey, your payment plan was accepted. We're expecting that your payment is to be made on May the 7th or whatever day it is. Make it formal, make it feel like they just negotiated a payment plan with you, and then make sure they stick to it. Because if you do this, you're doing everything right. You're being a good person and you're being gracious to your tenant. It happens. It may not be an excuse, it may genuinely, there may genuinely be something wrong. So you're being a gracious landlord, you're adhering to their timeline. So they set the date, you're you're allowing that to happen, and you're putting the ball in their court. You said, the rent payment is now due later. Here's your formal acceptance of that, everything's good. If they stick to it and they pay the rent payment on their due date, perfect. Everything's great. It was a fluke, they they they're back on track and everything's fine. But if they miss that, if they miss that date, that needs to trigger something in your mind and say, Am I being taken advantage of? Okay. And at that point, you've been the gracious landlord, you've given the leniency. Now you got to switch back and say, This is a business. I need to get paid. If a if a contractor sends you an invoice and they're not paid, shoot, they can put a lien on your property, right? And so it's that same level of business. If I'm not getting my rent payment, I have to take actions to get this tenant out and get my property back, right? Like that's what that's the type of attitude that you have to have. But don't get me wrong, it's great to have grace with your tenants and be be understanding, but do it in a way that you can identify quickly that you're being taken advantage of. All it takes is a few weeks and then all of a sudden they're behind on a on a rent payment. It's very hard to catch up whenever you have two rent payments due in the same week. It's nearly impossible, right? And so it's one of the biggest mistakes that I see. And it's it's it sucks having to break to a landlord that I know they're three weeks late on their rent, but I can almost guarantee you you won't see that money. You know, it it stinks. And so make sure it doesn't become a pattern. Tenants pay late. It is what it is. I mean, we've all experienced it, but the way that they react, the way that they pay on their payment plan, it's a key indicator of their future behavior. So just don't get taken advantage of. Be as lenient as you want and as gracious as you want, but just don't let it become a pattern. Professional landlords rely on consistency. Either the tenant is consistent in paying rent or they're not. You need to be able to identify that pattern. So rely on consistency, not the emotion that they invoke with their excuse. Okay, great. All right, now we're getting to some of the heavy hitters here. So these are some of the big, big ones. The top three mistakes. They are they're heavy. All right, so now moving on to mistake number two that a lot of new self-managing landlords make. Mistake number two, renting to a friend of a friend. So, mistake number two, renting to friends, family, or of course, your your standard friend of a friend. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see landlords make, and it's one of the fastest ways to create messy situations. So I'm a big Dave Ramsey guy. Some of his principles directly violate real estate in general. Like real estate, obviously, you you take loans, you get mortgages and stuff like that. But I like his principles. And Cameron, my wife and I, we follow Dave Ramsey. We do our best to live that lifestyle. But we're in real estate, so obviously we still try and abide by his guidance when it comes to rental properties. And one thing that Dave Ramsey preaches is to never take a loan from a family or a friend. The second money gets involved with family or friend, the whole dynamic changes. And I think that's so true when coming over to rental properties. So renting to friends or family, it muddies the water a lot. Because when you rent to family and you become their landlord, all of a sudden Thanksgiving dinner doesn't taste the same. It tastes a little bit different, especially knowing that cousin Janice over there is a week late in rent, but but it's okay that they're traveling over to Disney next week for little Timmy. And you know, it ta it's just so different and it muddies the waters a lot. So renting to friends and family tend to get you into a little bit of a messy situation, and then everything is emotional. Nothing can be transactional, nothing can be business decision, everything is emotional. So that's one aspect of it that I see that renting to friends and family can it can be a very emotional thing that changes the dynamic of the rental property, but more importantly, your relationship with that person. And so I say avoid that at all costs. Don't get me wrong, some people are successful at it, but the vast majority of the time it ends up bad. You never want to have to evict a cousin or something like that. It it stinks. So uh, and then a second aspect to that is renting to a friend of a friend. That means your friend has a co worker who was looking for a place to rent, or a buddy mentioned. That they have somebody who was looking to rent a house. They were just talking to about it last week. And it seems so perfect when it happens. It seems way too good to be true. And it usually is. And so what typically happens is they say, Oh, you're renting your property. I got a buddy who was just looking for a rent property. What are you going to rent it at? You tell them the price. Perfect. I'll send you their contact info. And it seems so easy. Great. I don't have to list the house. I don't have to show the house. I don't have to screen the person. I know this guy. I met him a few years ago. And your friend gives you their word. That's a big mistake. And unfortunately, what happens in that scenario is you sign a lease, they start paying rent, and it's so great, but you didn't screen them. That's where the mistake comes in. You don't screen them as seriously as you would have if it was your standard tenant that you found online. And that's where a lot of landlords mess up. That's where the mistake is made. Because these people who tend to rent from a friend to a friend and they rent with self-managing landlords, they typically have something on their background that's keeping them from renting from a management company or from a professional landlord. And so renting from a friend of her friend is not the worst thing in the world if you do your tenant screening and you have a procedure for that. If you have your set guidelines on what you need, like credit score, income, and all of that, you'll be fine. But if not, if you just take your friend's word for it, it's a mistake. It's a big mistake. And then you have to evict a buddy basically, and those conversations can be very awkward for the person who recommended them over to you. That's one of the biggest calls I get is I rent I rented to a coworker, I rented to a friend of a friend, didn't screen them. Three months in they stopped paying rent. They're ghosting me and I can't go to hold of them. And then since it was a friend of a friend, I didn't get a copy of their driver's license, I didn't get their social, and so now I can't evict them. I have to hire an attorney. And it becomes this whole thing. And so, so to sum it all up, close friends and family, don't rent to. Just stay away from it. They're your friend. Keep that relationship what it is. Don't introduce a different dynamic to an already great relationship. Don't do it. If you're gonna rent to a friend of a friend, if you're gonna do it, and if it is gonna make it easier for you, screen them strictly. Screen them the exact same way that you would if you found the tenant through Zillow or Realtor.com. Don't make exceptions and be sure to screen them very strictly. If you do that and if you treat it like a business relationship from the very beginning, it can be successful. But you've got to stick to your policies and you've got to stick to your procedures. Unfortunately, that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see in Dave Ramsey. He always preaches on his on his podcast. Borrower is slave to the lender. You you've probably heard him say that before. And Christmas Day doesn't sit right whenever your tenants are two weeks late on rent, but their kids have 20 gifts under the tree. You know, it just it muddies the water way too much. So just avoid it altogether. And then drumroll, please. Mistake number one that new self-managing landlords make is not checking in on the property. In my opinion, this is the biggest and worst mistake that new landlords can make. And it's just not not going by the property, not doing a yearly inspection of the property and just continually renewing to that tenant year over year. And I know what you're thinking, I moved out of town or it's a 45-minute drive away, but you gotta do it because when that rent payment's hitting on the first every month, it's so easy to say, out of sight, out of mind. I don't need to go by there, they've been great, let's just renew to them for another year. I mean, most landlords they'll gladly collect the rent every month, but they'll never physically go and inspect the property, and that's very dangerous because problems they grow very quietly, and no tenant is ever gonna rat on themselves, and tenants don't know what to look for, like all of us listeners of the Fort Worth Property Management Podcast or professional landlords. And so a yearly viewing of the property is a must. Some landlords even do it every six months, and so it's a must, especially when determining if you want to keep that tenant for longer, because in doing these annual inspections, you will find so many items that can be fixed quickly instead of letting them compound and compound over time. In annual occupied viewings that we do, we have found pets that we didn't know were living in the house. We found occupants who were living in the house that we didn't know about. Uh, of course, we found property damage that we wanted to get fixed, uh deferred maintenance, like not changing the air filters as often as the tenant should be, uh, and just different lease violations. And so you you want to go and visit the property because these things, if you can identify them early on, they can be fixed and save your relationship with the tenant, but more importantly, they can protect the house. Let's use property damage, for example. So let's say you move a tenant in, nine months in, you go do a yearly inspection, and you see that it's getting really dirty. The baseboards are starting to turn brown, there's a bunch of dust and dirt everywhere. In the kids' rooms, there's crayon marks on the walls. They painted an accent wall that you didn't know about. Now you you discovered that in month nine of the lease. Fast forward two months later, you don't renew to them, you get them out and you fix everything that went on, you find a new tenant. It costs you minimal money because you can deduct it all from their security deposit. That's best case scenario. Now, in that exact same scenario, instead of going to view the property, you look at how they paid rent on the first every month, you renew to them. Now, for a full second year, you don't visit the house, that dirtiness is gonna compound into even more, into baseboards that have to be completely replaced instead of just cleaned. Now the child has drawn on bore walls. Or all of the drawings have just seeped into the paint, and now the child's getting older and wants a pumpy, and now the second year they got a puppy, and it just compounds and compounds from there, and then you do that for another year or two. Now the damage exceeds what you can deduct from a security deposit. Now the damage to the house is gonna cost you thousands of dollars, and you don't have that on hand, right? And the tenants are just gonna move out, assume they're not getting their security deposit back, and now you're out any of the cash flow that you've made over those few years. And so it's extremely important to go and visit the property as often as you can. Don't be overbearing, don't go once a month and intrude on the tenants' experience living in the house. But every six months, once a year, it's good to go and check on the property and make sure that they are upholding it to good quality standards because this is an asset for you. You want to make sure that this property is being taken care of to the best of its ability. There's also one aspect of the property that you'll never be able to discover via phone call, via FaceTime, photos, or anything like that, and that's smell. Smelling the house, the odor that the tenants may be bringing with them, um, the odor of smoking or marijuana, the odor of a pet that's being hidden. All of that will be discovered when you visit the property, or the smell of a beautifully taken care of, clean home. All of those things can only be discovered by walking the property and visiting in person. So I'm gonna harp on it again. This is the number one mistake that homeowners make. They just don't go out there, so they don't know the condition of the house. They haven't seen it in three years, and I'm like, dude, this is a $350,000 asset that you're not going to check up on. I only have like a hundred bucks in my bank account, and I check on that more often than you check on this huge asset, you know. So it just doesn't make any sense to me. And so a yearly viewing is very important to do. There's a few other kind of pro tips that we give new landlords. So you can do what we call unofficial viewings of the house. Anytime a work order is submitted, if you can meet your handyman there or if you complete the work yourself, peek around a little bit, take a look at what's going on. Don't pry, don't go into any rooms that you weren't invited into, but you can look at when you first walk in the house, how it looks, right? That's a great way to get extra eyes on the house, and you simply are just meeting your handyman there to oversee the repair that's taken over. So it's an extra foot in the door, right? Uh, an extra pair of eyes on the house throughout the lease. And then, of course, uh driving by the property's exterior. And so on your way home from work one day, take the extra 20 minutes to go drive by the house and go check on how it's looking. Obviously, you can inspect the yard, you can look at the flower beds, how the bushes are trimmed, and that's a small indication of how they'll be taking care of the inside of the house. You can also recognize patterns that there's more cars in the driveway than usual, that there are kids playing up front that you don't really know. You see them playing catch with a dog or something like that, right? Like there's so many things that can be uncovered just by driving by. Don't go pry, don't go to the house unannounced and go into the backyard, but just drive by and make sure nothing crazy is going on. So again, treat it like a property, as if this was a $350,000 asset you had sitting in front of you. I'd be checking on that constantly. Okay, so uh treat it like a business and go and visit the property and make sure that it's being taken care of. Be sure to inspect the property at least annually. Inspections protect the asset. A tenant will never take care of a house as good as you would because you own it, but by you consistently checking in on the house, you can do your best to protect it over time. We all know that real estate is a long-term play, and if you don't do the work every lease to make sure that it's taken care of for the long term, it's gonna end up biting you in the butt and costing you a little bit of money. So if I had any advice to new landlords listening to this episode, I would say when you rent your property out, make sure it's not to a family or friend, make sure you screen them very strictly, and then when they move in, go check in on it. Go visit the property, see it as often as you can, and make sure that they're taking care of it. So obviously, there's kind of a root of the problem here. There's a root of all the mistakes where they come from. And the fact of the matter is that most landlords they make all of these mistakes because of one thing. They treat landlording casually. It's like, oh, I moved out, I couldn't sell my house, so I just decided to rent it to Sally from work. Landlords who are successful, who have a rental property long term that actually makes money for them, are those who flip their mindset and become an operator, who become a professional landlord. It is your side gig now, right? It's your side job that you are a landlord. You build systems that you follow, you document everything along the way, and then you treat this property like a business. You check in on it, you make sure it's upholding its value, and you make sure the person or the people who directly impact the condition of that performing asset are of good quality and are taking care of it for the long term. And so don't treat landlording casually. If landlording is just a casual thing that you're doing, you're not taking it seriously. I would seriously consider hiring a property management company who will take it seriously because we've seen everything. And we would much rather start now while the house is empty than get a call from you six months from now, and we're doing an eviction. You know what I mean? So if you have any questions or if you're on the fence, feel free to reach out to me directly. I will talk through all of this with you. I will give you this advice. I'll probably even send you over a link to this episode too, so you can listen to it along your journey of uh renting out your property. And so, just to recap real quick, the top five mistakes that I see new landlords make when renting out their property is number five, not bringing the property up to Texas Property Code. Number four, overpricing their property in the market. Number three, being way too lenient with rent payments, number two, renting to friends, family, or a friend of a friend. And the number one biggest mistake that I see landlords make, not checking in on the property. The goal is not to be a perfect landlord, it's not to be way too strict and overbearing. The goal is to avoid expensive mistakes. That's what the game is. Avoid expensive mistakes consistently enough to where this asset produces money for you. If you want help building any of those systems around your rental property or evaluating whether a professional property management company is needed, reach out to me. Fortworth Property Management.com is our website. My email is Mason at firstchoicepm.com. That's Mason at onesthoicepm.com. I talk with homeowners every day about all of these items, so it'll be no issue for me to answer whatever you got going on with your rental property. We appreciate each and every one of our listeners who who tune in every few weeks, who look forward to our episodes. Thank you so much for consistently listening to our podcast. If there is anything that you want to see in future episodes or even something that you're struggling with right now that you would love to hear put into an episode, please leave a comment below. Reach out to me directly, and I will absolutely talk through it with you. I am Mason, your host of the Fort Worth Property Management Podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you on the next episode. Have a good rest of your day.