Did you know that about 70% of rental properties are owned by individual investors? If you are one of those property owners, just know that you are not alone.
It is understandable to get overwhelmed about running every aspect of your apartment building. Part of this may be managing property maintenance.
You may want to make sure that your tenants are taken care of but also may be curious about what tenants are obligated to do to maintain their own living space. This guide breaks down some of the legal and optional responsibilities for maintaining properties.
Tenant Responsibilities
Common sense obligations tend to be the biggest things tenants are responsible for. In other words, they should not be using their living space recklessly.
So, what does this mean?
A simple thing can be to take out the trash regularly and properly dispose of it. Failing to do so can attract unwanted animals into an apartment.
As a result, landlords may have to call pest control to take care of this problem. However, if this is not addressed early enough, these pests can cause physical damage to an apartment.
Another example could be a reckless fire caused in an apartment building.
A tenant may wake up in the middle of the night and decide that they want to cook something. So, they turn on the stove to cook a meal, but fall asleep before that meal is finished. As a result, this could cause a fire in the apartment because somebody left their stove on for too long.
Things like this are on the tenants to manage their space properly.
Optional Tasks
Now that we have gone over things that tenants are legally responsible for, it is time to discuss things that are not required of tenants. While these things are not required from tenants, they can also potentially help both the tenant and the landlord.
An example is if the tenant's apartment has a maintenance issue. This could be something like the plumbing in a toilet.
The person living in the apartment may be a professional plumber. In this situation, the tenant could offer to fix this problem in exchange for reduced rent. If they do a good enough job on their own toilet, a landlord may be willing to call them for help with other toilets in the building.
Then, there are smaller things, such as making an effort to maintain the community space as well as reporting problems in the building as soon as possible to the landlord.
Learn More About Property Maintenance
These are the essential things you need to know about tenant property maintenance for rental properties. There are things that tenants are legally responsible for and things that tenants have the option to do to help out.
Some legal responsibilities come down to common sense. That includes taking your trash out regularly and not performing any reckless actions in your living space. Then, there are simple things such as reporting a building problem to the landlord sooner rather than later.
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