How to rent out your house

When a rental property lands in your lap, should you hold or fold? Outsource the management or do it yourself? Are you ready for the tenants, toilets and trash?

It doesn’t take much to turn an ordinary homeowner into a landlord. Maybe you have to move but want to keep your home and rent it out. Or you have a change of fortune — you get married, receive an inheritance or buy a new house before you unload the old one.

While many people would love to have an extra house to worry about, owning even one rental property can be a headache. You have to tease the problem apart and ask yourself, among other things:

• Is it worth hanging onto this property?
• How will you feel about strangers moving into your beloved home?
• Can you, a novice with a day job, turn a dime on a real-estate rental while avoiding the Tenants from Hell?

The answer to these questions depends partly on the place itself. Ideally, it’s in good repair, in a safe part of town and the mortgage is cheap or paid off. The more your place departs from this ideal, the more closely you should look at selling if you can. That’s because, whatever your reason for holding and renting out a spare house — and there are many — it won’t work if you don’t treat it like a business.

Can you do it? Should you?
The biggest criterion for whether you should even attempt this may be whether your temperament is suited to being a landlord. “You first have to look yourself in the mirror and ask if you have the time and the skill set to do this properly,” says Robert S. Griswold, who owns Griswold Real Estate Management in San Diego and writes the nationally syndicated “Rental Forum” column for InmanNews. Griswold also wrote “Property Management for Dummies.”
Landlords’ tales of nightmare tenants

In addition to your obligation to yourself to keep the business afloat, your landlord responsibilities include:

• Providing a safe, smoothly functioning home for your tenants. That means, for example, making sure plumbing, wiring and appliances function, outdoor areas and stairways are safe. It means quickly responding to a tenant’s report of the inevitable malfunction or problem.
• Advertising the rental, selecting tenants and evicting them if you must — all of which are governed by law.

If you can’t see yourself performing these roles, it doesn’t mean you can’t pursue your rental plans; you just might be one of the people for whom it’s worth paying a professional property-management service. In fact, if you are out of town, consider the decision made; you simply must be on site to manage a rental.