Tenants Performing DIY Maintenance On Your Property, Good Idea?

Should you allow your tenants to undertake maintenance in your investment property?

Now with all the D.I.Y. shows on TV everybody thinks they can do a pro­fes­sional job and a lot of people underestimate the skill and pro­fes­sion that trades­men put into their work, not to men­tion the expens­ive tools.

Many landlords think it saves money to have tenants per­form main­ten­ance at the prop­erty.

How­ever, many times it is the oppos­ite and causes dif­fi­cult landlord/tenant issues.

We see this often where a ten­ant gets over their head in how much work is required and cre­ates more work than necessary.

Example 1) ten­ant per­forms bath­room renov­a­tion and freaks out prop­erty manager!

A land­lord was friends with the ten­ants and the ten­ant asked him if he could “change some things” the land­lord said “sure thing as long as it is noth­ing major”. 

Three weeks later the prop­erty man­ager car­ried our a routine P.I. (prop­erty inspec­tion).

The prop­erty man­ager became con­fused when he could not find a bath tub that was on his report. He also found all the tiles ripped off the walls.

The freaked out prop­erty man­ager call the owner right away and told him about the changes to the prop­erty.

The owner seemed vaguely con­cerned and said “Aaaarrr I think I gave the ten­ant per­mis­sion to make some changes, and he must not have fin­ished them yet, but I didn’t think he was going to remove a bath tub!”.

Now in this cir­cum­stance the owner gave some per­mis­sion and did not mind the work done when it was fin­ished.

This could have poten­tially ended up in the Con­sumer, Trader and Ten­ancy Tribunal, if the owner was unhappy with the bath tub removal.

Example 2) I have one more for you where ten­ant fixes a shower head and costs the owner $678

A ten­ant in Seven Hills fixed a shower head.

“Yeah I know a shower head, how hard could that be right?” 

Well the ten­ant did not fix it cor­rectly and the water was back­ing up in the plumb­ing.

Water was get­ting into the wall behind the shower because of this.

The shower wall needed to be replaced to carry out the repair and fix it prop­erly by a licensed plumber.

Our agency does not sup­port unin­sured and unli­censed ten­ants to per­form work on rental prop­er­ties as it can be fraught with danger and can often res­ult in dis­pute.

We recom­mend if in doubt use a licensed qual­i­fied pro­fes­sional.

You save your time, money and headaches.