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In Washington, D.C., doing a biannual inspection of your rental property is an excellent way to ensure your home is being well-maintained. It also gives you the benefit of communicating with your tenants, and ensuring they are following the terms of the lease agreement. We always recommend that you do these inspections, and today we’re discussing why they are so important.
Inspections While the Property is Occupied
As a landlord or a property investor in Washington, D.C., you’re probably already doing some general inspections of your property. Hopefully, you’re doing a standard inspection before a tenant moves in and after a tenant moves out so you can document the condition of the home and hold your tenants accountable for any damage that’s left behind.
Those are critical inspections, but we also think it’s important to get inside your property during the lease term. Most of the tenants we work with are renting homes from us for three, four, even five years or more. If you don’t go into the property at all during that time, you might get an unpleasant surprise at the end of the tenancy when the tenant moves out and you’re faced with a lot of deferred and unreported maintenance.
Benchmark the Rental Property Condition
One of the best reasons to conduct these inspections is that you want to be able to benchmark the property’s condition during a tenancy. You want to measure whether your tenants are taking care of the home the way you expect them to. You want to make sure they’re following the lease terms and meeting their requirements and responsibilities.
Proactive and Preventative Maintenance
Biannual inspections also allow you to be proactive in the maintenance of your rental property. It shows your tenants that you care about the property and its condition. It gives you the opportunity to identify maintenance issues. No repair problem ever got less expensive with time. So, if you can discover a minor problem early, you’ll probably save yourself money and headaches. You can take care of the things that need immediate attention and you can also make a list of the work you might want to plan for in the future. You might see an appliance that needs to be replaced during the next turnover or you’ll add a to-do item to the list for your vendor the next time he or she visits the home.
Inspection Reports and Transparency
These biannual inspections also allow us to communicate with you and show you what we’ve done or what we’ve had our vendors do. This contributes to complete transparency. If you asked us to install new drywall or update an appliance, you’ll be able to see in the inspection report that it was done.
There are many reasons to do a biannual inspection. If you have any questions about why you should do these, contact us at EJF Real Estate Services. We’d love to discuss the merits of these inspections with you.
