Are you a first-time landlord in Santa Clarita? These 5 tips can help even experienced rental owners avoid costly mistakes. 

While owning rental property can be an incredibly lucrative and rewarding experience, it’s not without its challenges. 

To be successful as a landlord actually requires a wide range of knowledge and skills, from business and marketing to legal services to the basic mechanics of home repairs.   Otherwise, you run the risk of knowingly or unknowingly making common mistakes that can add up to significant consequences. 

Here are five common mistakes even experienced landlords make, as well as the solutions and protections you can use to avoid them.

5 Common SCV Landlord Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

1. Breaking The Law

Owning a rental property can be a complicated job, and sometimes, it comes with even more complicated repercussions.  Even the most experienced and knowledgeable landlords still learn lessons along the way. But the goal is to avoid the kind of situations and missteps that can cost you serious time, money and legal consequences.  Here are a few of the common legal mistakes landlords can make without realizing it: 

• Asking prospective renters discriminating questions 
• Not taking the tenant screening process seriously 
• Including illegal provisions in a rental contract 
• Failing to provide a safe environment 
• Refusing to make certain repairs 
• And more 

Oftentimes, these simple mistakes are made with the best of intentions and seem harmless at the time. In the wrong situation, however, they can lead to costly legal battles that could have been avoided.  That’s why, at SCREM, our entire team and process is built to protect our landlords from these potential problems. For example, our tenant screening process has been designed and set up by our Real Estate Attorney and President Steffanie Stelnick, who created the questions and contracts with years of specialized legal experience. Our landlords can be confident that every step is above-board and provides confident legal protection.  Additionally, SCREM has a licensed home inspector and qualified maintenance department on staff. That means we have the professionals in place to make sure that your property is up to code and provides a safe environment at all times. Necessary home repairs are addressed quickly, and when our landlords are unsure if a repair is necessary, they have the support of a real estate lawyer’s qualified perspective.

2. Under-pricing Your Property

Pricing a rental property is one of the trickiest parts of being a landlord. If you price it too low, you might get a flood of applicants, without actually attracting the right tenant. If you price it too high, your property might stay vacant for too long, and you’ll lose money in the process. Of course you want to maximize your profit by getting the best price possible, but it’s a delicate balancing act.  Especially in the current market, prices are changing quickly. Today, the appropriate price for your property could be drastically different than it was when you listed it even a year ago. Because the market is changing so quickly, it really takes a deep, inside knowledge of the market in order to find that ideal price point.  Our team has decades of experience determining the appropriate market rate for each property, and not only do they have a nuanced understanding of the market, but they also know the local areas better than anyone in the industry. In fact, we can help you assess your property’s current value – and answer all your questions – free of charge.

3. Lax Tenant Screenings

In our experience, managing Santa Clarita investment properties is either a smart and easy form of passive income, or a costly and time-consuming risk – depending on your tenants.  When you have responsible and dependable tenants, property management is a positive experience for everyone involved. But finding the right tenant to care for your investment requires experience, resources and a professional team.  When finding the perfect tenant, the screening process generally considers five areas for a prospective renter: 

1. Income
2. Past history (including former landlord/employer references)
3. Credit history
4. Evictions
5. Criminal history

By understanding each of these elements, you can get a clear picture of whether or not a potential tenant is the right choice for your property. This approach will help you understand if each applicant is able to make timely rent payments, take care of the property and communicate issues when appropriate. When you can find a tenant who meets these criteria, growing your property into a valuable investment becomes much, much easier.  That’s why, at SCREM, we have the professionals, tools and resources needed to accurately evaluate risk and provide confidence in your tenant screening process. Since challenging credit has become a more common occurrence in the pandemic, these industry resources are more important than ever if you want a seamless, profitable tenant placement process.

4. Budget Marketing Tactics

In the real estate market, they say it’s all about location, location, location. But in the rental market, it’s all about marketing. In fact, the right marketing will help you attract the maximum amount of tenant applications and the most qualified candidates.  That’s why, at SCREM, we settle for nothing less than the highest standard in traditional and digital marketing strategies, so we can cast a wide and deep net into the pool of applicants. That’s how we help you find the right price for your property – and the right tenant for your price.  In order to secure the best possible outcome for each property, our marketing and advertising includes:  

• In-person showings hosted by a leasing agent, who will market your property to all interested tenants 
• Digital listing on our website, which syndicates to thousands of other websites in California and beyond 
• Zillow Membership, which features your listing at the top of search results with a “verified source” badge on Zillow, Trulia and Hotpads
• Additional syndication to 35 different rental websites including realtor.com, apartments.com, padmapper.com and more 
• Social media marketing that features high-quality photography and video on multiple platforms including Facebook and Instagram 
• A rich referral source from past and present tenants and property owners, as well as referrals from approximately 1,600+ local real estate agents 
• “For Rent” signs placed in the yard, window or balcony of your property that display our office phone number and website
• A list of our available rentals available 24 hours a day on our website, at our office and by fax

5. No Professional Network

If you’ve ever owned a rental property before, you know how much work goes into ensuring it becomes profitable. And if you haven’t, then it’s not a lesson you want to learn by mistake. Whether you’re pricing your property, looking for tenants, trying to make home repairs, or drafting a rental contract, it pays off to have a strong network on your side. In fact, it can make a big difference to have people you can reach out to for questions or referrals, whenever you run into an issue. The more people you have in your corner, the easier it will be to navigate the landlord experience with success.  The benefit of working with a team like SCREM is you have an entire network of industry professionals to help guide you every step of the way: 

• SCREM team members with decades of experience 
• Professional and reliable maintenance crew 
• Licensed home inspector 
• Trusted and reliable vendor referrals 
• JSL Realty, our partnering real estate agency 
• The Law Offices of Steffanie Stelnick, our legal consultation and support 

With a team like this, we can help you find, purchase and upgrade your first rental property. Then, once it’s ready for the market, we can help you screen your tenants, move them in, and handle rent collection every month.  If there are any issues, you have our legal protection on your side. If everything goes right, we can help you expand your portfolio with our Investor Program. From start to finish, SCREM is designed to give you a successful and easy landlord experience – without those common mistakes and pitfalls.

How We Can Help

NSCREM is owned by a husband-and-wife team who have combined expertise in the legal, real estate and management experience. They personally own rental properties and work with tenants, and they even own a real estate agency in Santa Clarita. Todd and Steffanie have years of experience in every aspect of the industry, and they’ve poured that expertise into the processes and staff members that support SCREM clients every day. About Southern California Real Estate Management Inc. Southern California Real Estate Management Inc. was founded in 1987, and has grown to become the largest property management company of individually-owned single-family homes and condominiums in the Santa Clarita Valley. Our locally owned and operated company currently manages about 700+ homes in Southern California. Our Team specializes entirely in residential property management.