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Our normal guests usually stay for a couple of days, but what happens when they want to stay over 30 days? Or rent one of your properties right off the bat for 30 days or more? Short answer, they become a tenant, and with that comes a whole new set of rules you need to be wary of. In this article, I’ll help you manage guests that want to stay in your rentals beyond 30 days and provide more tips to help you deal with the whole process. Let’s get started!
Short term rental properties are typically rented for a short period, hence the “short” in the title. This is also our typical definition of an STR (30 days or less). But when that is exceeded, and your guests go beyond the 30-day period, they officially become residents or tenants. And becoming a resident leads to a whole bunch of extra legal exposure, which could have potential risks for your properties.
Once your guests go beyond 30 days, both of you will be governed by landlord-tenant laws.
So as a resident and not a short term guest, if there is a potential problem (they don’t pay rent, damage the property, etc.) you may not be able to remove them from your properties without going through required eviction processes in court and the expense for damages could be much harder to recoup. That’s why every STR owner needs to take some precautions before accepting long-term guests. But first, let’s talk about approving potential residents for stays over 30 days.
One of the beauties of managing STRs and automating everything in our business is that we don’t need somebody at the property when a short-term guest comes in or when showing a property. We could do practically everything online! There are a lot of different tools that can help us automate and manage our business, and the same is true for dealing with potential residents. You can easily show them your property, explain, and receive signatures on applications and approve applicants without the need for an in-person meeting; and you can do it securely. Let’s talk about some best practices.
Unlike STR guests, where we don’t need to show our properties, long-term tenants need to take a look at the place before signing anything. So expect them to ask a lot of questions and look for different facilities and features STR guests don’t usually ask. But just because the questions increase, that doesn’t mean your workload and time spent has to.
Thank you, smart locks! We owe you one. The next drink is on me. Both electronic door locks and smart locks have become widely popular for the STR community due to their efficiency and benefits. Replacing traditional locks with electronic ones saves you the trouble of making duplicate keys and the possibility of losing them, or worse, an unauthorized guest using them when they shouldn’t.
Smart locks make showing your property remotely a breeze. With just a few clicks, you can send a digital code to your guests and give them temporary access to your property to look around the place in their own time. It saves both you and your potential resident a lot of time. But before you give a potential resident a code to your property, you need to get some information from them.
You don’t want to burden a potential long-term guest by having them fill out a complete application, run their credit, and background, verify income and employment, all just so they can view your property; most people won’t do that. Instead, you can easily send them a Google Form asking for basic info and a copy of their identification. You can also outline your rental process at the top of the form and let them know that you will need ALL of their information before proceeding. Have them fill out a requested time to view the property as well, so you don’t have to go back and forth coordinating. Any time will work for you, remember? You just need to hit a button with a digital lock, or you could even pre-program it for the date they requested. Now, if they like the property, then afterward is the time we send them a full-blown application and run background credit checks. Luckily there are many sites that can help you with that aspect as well, like Cozy, Zillow rental manager, or for further screening, you can check out ClearChecks. Then once their application is approved, you can proceed to discuss terms and signing the lease.
It’s also actually pretty cool to have the potential tenants take a look at the property without you being there because it takes a lot of pressure off of them. Back in the days, landlords or managers usually follow around potential tenants, and having them in your presence creates a bit of pressure. But now that you can show a listing to them remotely, they will feel free to look around as much as they can and make a better decision; in turn, creating a happier guest that will stay with you for a long time.
The basis of a legal relationship between a landlord and a tenant is based on both property laws and a contract, that’s why you need to set up a lease agreement. A lease agreement is the blueprint for rentals; it sets the rights and responsibilities of both the landlord and the tenant.
Before you hand over a property to a potential resident, make sure you set your expectations first. Outline all of the important points of the lease: the rate, the deposit, the dates of payment, rules of extending their stay or lease, everything you deem necessary or can think of; now is your time. Make sure to cover all your grounds. Before you finalize everything is your time to be clear, not after! To sign the contract, you can ask for digital signatures; it’s as legit as a handwritten one.
After you’ve successfully gone through everything above and signed a lease agreement with your new tenant, congratulations! Now, all that’s left for you to do is to monitor your rental and the income coming in. The more rentals and tenants you have though the more tedious it can become, but fortunately, like most other aspects of our business, there are tools for that.
I’ve used several management platforms in the past (from basic rent collectors to full-blown property management software like Buildium). But an easy site to use that is FREE is called Cozy. You can collect rents and deposits for multiple properties and set automatic reminders for your tenants. You can even automate maintenance issues and route them to your local handyman, so you don’t get the “clogged toilet” call in the middle of the night. It handles the whole tenant process for you, saving you a lot of time and effort.
To avoid future disputes or issues, have your tenants take a look at the place thoroughly once they settle in, and if they find any sort of damage, they must send a photo of it to you within three days since their move-in.
And since they will be staying long-term, you won’t have the chance to check your property frequently, so a simple solution, if you’re at all worried about your furniture, (which you wouldn’t have in a normal long-term rental), is to set a mandatory cleaning every 30 days. You can also include that in your lease. If a guest is paying short-term rents for a long-term stay, they won’t bock at it, trust me. It’s also a good way to help your housekeepers maintain work and keep them around for when the property goes back to a nightly rental.
This might seem like a lot of work, but it’s really not. We want to make things as easy as possible for our guests and tenants, but we also want to make sure we’re checking all our boxes and covering all our grounds before coming up to an agreement. Long-term tenants that pay us STR rates are awesome. It’s a great opportunity for the STR community, but if we want to take advantage of this opportunity without jeopardizing our assets, we need to make sure we are accepting qualified guests in our properties.
Cheers to short-term rents for long-term stays!
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