A two dollar outlet cover can cost a landlord six weeks on a voucher unit

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A pattern that shows up often enough on voucher turnovers that it is worth telling as a story. Say a landlord buys a small duplex and decides to rent the downstairs unit to a voucher tenant, because the last tenant paid in cash three months out of twelve and then vanished. He wants the government paid portion. He hires a make-ready crew for the unit. New paint, new vinyl, cleaned vents, a replaced range because the old one had two dead burners. The unit looks better than most owner-occupied kitchens. He walks it, pays the crew, and considers it done. Then the housing authority inspection comes and fails. A missing cover plate on an outlet behind where the fridge sits, and a window in the back bedroom that will not stay up on its own. That is the whole list. Nothing structural, nothing expensive. Both get fixed in an afternoon; the plate costs about two dollars at the hardware store and the window takes a piece of dowel and a new sash lock. The part nobody plans for is the calendar. The re-inspection is not the next day. It gets booked out, and between that and the tenant's move-in paperwork the unit sits empty roughly six weeks past when the landlord expected to be collecting. The landlord in this position usually ends up making one change: the next unit he turns, he walks it himself with the inspection checklist in hand before he ever calls anybody. Crews that work voucher-bound units often adopt the same habit. It costs twenty minutes and it is the cheapest twenty minutes in the job.

5 replies

joe_delgado5ActivePRO

Six weeks of vacancy over a cover plate is the kind of thing that makes me twitch. On my margins that's the whole first year of cash flow. Though I guess if his alternative was another cash tenant who ghosts him, he still came out ahead.

stephen_ok9ActivePRO

The scheduling gap is the part I never see in the write-ups. Everybody talks about the payment being reliable and nobody says how long you wait between the fail and the re-check. Does that vary a lot by authority, thatch?

laurenkim53 PF4APRO 14

In plenty of rural counties the whole jurisdiction has one inspector and he works two days a week. Everyone local knows it. You plan around him the way you plan around the septic contractor.

marcus_hale41CapitalPRO

I'd want to know whether the window was a fail on its own or whether it got written up because the inspector was already writing. Once someone starts filling out a form they tend to keep filling it out. Not a criticism of the inspector, just how people work.

diane_kowalskiServicePRO

The twenty minutes with the checklist is the whole post. Cheap habits that compress calendars are worth more than most of what I read.

A two dollar outlet cover can cost a landlord six weeks on a voucher unit

5 replies