Words From Your Broker | Brokers Corner with Tanya Chappell

Hi All, I hope everybody had a happy safe Fourth of July. I think with Independence Day being in the middle of the week this year a lot of people had a very extended weekend.

So, it’s July in Gainesville and If you’re from here you know that means that almost the entire town is moving right now. Our vendors are working hard to get everybody’s property ready for a nice smooth move in. Properties that have been on the sale market with tenants in place are now seeing more serious buyers being the tenant’s leases are coming to an end, making occupying the property right after closing more possible. This is good reason for sellers to wait until the last two months of a tenant’s lease to put the property on the sales market. It also helps keep the current tenant a little happier being they won’t have a lot of people in and out of property for months on end. And it keeps the property from appearing to have been on the sales market for an extended amount of time, which concerns buyers and buyer’s agents.

There has been a new trend this season that has been very challenging and that is that we are getting not only multiple applications for each property but sometimes 10 applications for each property with everyone demanding to be heard and processed immediately. It has been impossible to keep up with. Because of that I have invested in AppFolio‘s rental call center so I now have a 24 hour rental call center that will be able to answer all the questions about our properties for rent and our application and screening process. Although at first adverse to adding more overhead it has been well worth the cost this season. Of course, because of the overwhelming need for rental housing we have been able to increase rental rates Almost entirely across the board and in some cases by 15%. That being said as soon as June came around we got contracts on all but one of my occupied properties that we had on the sales market.

Thankfully Gainesville has a lot more going for it these days than just the University of Florida so if your property has not sold or rented by the end of July that’s no longer the end of the world. It definitely gets pretty slow around the holidays though.

It’s also hurricane season. It’s kind of felt like “Monsoon season” lately. We’re back to those heavy afternoon thunderstorms that pour buckets. All the lawns have come back to life and look beautiful. Erosion becomes a really big problem in heavy rains so if your home doesn’t have a good gutter system be on the lookout for washout areas around your home. You don’t want a little erosion to start undermining your Foundation and create unnecessary settling. It costs 10’s of thousands of dollars to repair most settling issues. There can also be a lot of damage from falling dead branches during these storms so be sure to do your part of preventing problems by pruning dead branches before the storm season begins.

We have had a couple of busted pipes this season as well and have had to oversee mold remediation projects. I recently sat down with Dryer’s DKI Mold remediation, a company I’ve used for the last 20 years, and reviewed a couple of the jobs we’ve done and thought it’d be helpful to feature them in our newsletter. Tis the season, right?!

While we of course don’t want anyone to need them, we do highly recommend their service should you need them. They also do carpet cleaning. Check out the interview and a before after job in the trailing video in our feature article.

We’ve got one more round of heavy move outs at the end of July then it’ll be business as usual again. At least these days with Gainesville being less seasonal than previous years were only turning over around 10 properties a month. Compared to the 40-60 per months like we did in older times so this is a cake walk! Ola’ Happy turning 😉

Dreyers DKI mold remediators interview with Zach Heern

Part 1: A Landlords Nightmare-Evaluation of a Flooded Rental Apartment

Part 2: Dry-out of Flooded Rental Apartment

Part 3: Property Ready for New Tenants