Renting options

Last week I talked about renting out rooms in to your home to people and how you fall under the Innkeeper’s Act. This can be a great way to create some extra income, but it also can be a bit tricky when you end up sharing the common areas of your home with strangers.
An alternative that is much more common place is renting out part of your personal residence. Renting out a basement suite or even living in the basement and renting out an upper unit is a great way for a homeowner to create some extra income and help pay their mortgage off faster.
It also requires the homeowner ensuring they understand all the applicable laws and rules that apply to their situation and that they make sure they do all of their due diligence. If you’ve ever seen the movie Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton, you’ll know what I’m talking about and why it’s so important!
When it comes to dealing with finding tenants, the first step is always making sure you adequately screen whom you may be entrusting your property with. This is even more important when they will be living in the same house as you, even if they are separated by a locked door. Yet the number of landlords who actually do screen tenants is appallingly low.
As the rental market continues to tighten up in Calgary and the surrounding area, there will be more sketchy individuals appearing who will use any dirty tricks they possibly can to get into a property. Once they are there, if they know how to work the system and the landlord doesn’t it’s easy for them to turn their stay into a few months worth of rent free existence.
Here is a quick rundown on a couple of the most common scams and how to avoid them. A very common one is the fake reference of either an employer or a previous landlord. Both of these are relatively easy to detect, if you know how.
Whenever a tenant provides a work reference, you need to verify they really work there and that the number they have provided is accurate. I was just emailing back and forth with a landlord the other day that went through this. The potential tenant had provided his supervisor’s direct cell number for a reference. However, when the landlord called the company directly (she used Google to get the real phone number) and asked to speak to the supervisor, she found out not only that the supervisor didn’t work there, but also neither did the prospective tenant.
The same verification needs to be completed with the previous landlord references and once again, Google can be very handy. By typing in the landlord’s phone number and searching, you can often verify they are indeed landlords with rental property as you often find their new ads as they try to find new tenants, or remnants of old ads. Or if you cannot find anything, it might just be a red flag.
In some cases, it’s not just the references that are fake; sometimes even the identity of the tenant may not be true. It never hurts to ask for picture id when having a tenant fill out an application form to rent your property. This just helps verify they are who they say they are and again, if they cannot supply any id, perhaps it’s another red flag?