COVID-19 Tenant Payment Performance Update through August 20
We truly hope you appreciate our extra efforts to keep you informed about the COVID impact on tenant rent payment performance. There are a lot of issues outside of our control, but we want to communicate to keep you informed. Please send us any suggestions for what additional information you’d like to see.
Please be sure to share this with anyone you know interested in real estate investing or looking for a better property manager, so they can see what they are missing!
EVICTION MORATORIUM UPDATE
It appears the Eviction Moratorium is finally over – the government is not kidding this time!
The Supreme Court struck down the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) last-ditch attempt to extend the moratorium and the Democrats couldn’t get enough votes together to pass a law giving the CDC the needed authority.
Watch out though, for states and local governments to pass their own eviction moratorium statutes. Already the states of California, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Washington have passed different degrees of eviction delays. Many are being challenged by landlords in local courts.
We’re now getting court dates, but many judges, especially those in Detroit, are adjourning their eviction cases to give tenants more time to apply for CERA funds – despite complaints from numerous landlord organizations that many tenants can afford to pay are not.
We just received this “Flowchart of Summary Proceedings” published by the Michigan Judicial Institute. While this is helpful to understand the eviction court process, unfortunately, many judges still make up their own rules.
GOVERNMENT AID FOR PAST DUE TENANTS
In the month of August, we received almost $70,000 in COVID Emergency Rental Assistance (CERA) checks. Received a bunch more approvals too. Approvals though, seem to be coming faster than the checks.
It’s still taking us an incredible amount of time and resources to make this happen. Caseworkers are claiming they are not getting our submissions, forcing us to email the same application packages 2 or 3 times. We fully believe that they are using this as an excuse instead of admitting they are way behind on processing applications.
Many of the government offices charged with approving CERA applications and issuing checks are now trying to hire more workers. But guess what? People don’t want to work and those that do and are hired need weeks, if not months, of training. So, don’t expect the timing to get better any time soon☹
DETROIT NOTE: Most CERA application caseworkers are only paying 80% of eligible funds if a property doesn’t have its Certificate of Compliance from the city. After months of warning our clients this could happen, many now want us to perform miracles and get their properties inspected and repaired ASAP. Has anyone not heard that there is a labor shortage in the USA? We’re doing our best, but please be reasonable with your expectations😊
RENT PAYMENT TRENDS 30-60-90+ Days Behind – thru August 31, 2021
We added around 50 units last month, many of them from our competition that has given up on chasing tenants they can’t evict. These new units with nonperforming tenants finally caused a slight negative charge to our overall performance numbers, as the graph below shows.
Macomb County: After a slight decrease in performance in July, we saw better payment performance in August!
Oakland County: Despite bringing on several properties in Pontiac, with challenging tenant situations, our payment performance improved in August in Oakland County.
Wayne County: Again, we were able to get improvements in all areas as shown below.
Tenants are slowly starting to realize their at risk of now being evicted and we’re starting to get more cooperation from them. We do expect a percentage of tenants to fight their evictions to the bitter end, and perhaps trash the property on the way out in irrational retribution.
FAVOR: If you have a property that has seen an improvement in rent delinquencies, please take a moment to give our Delinquencies & Evictions Department a compliment for all their hard work. They spend their days dealing with a lot of negativity from tenants (and some owners), so a bit of positive appreciation from you would go a long way to make their day!
CASH-FOR-KEYS: If you’d like to explore getting rid of a tenant NOW versus waiting for the end of the Eviction Moratorium, contact us about paying delinquent tenants to move. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to do, but we’ll analyze the business case for you to determine if it make sense.
For those of you that have contacted us to explore Cash-for-Keys offers to nonpaying tenants, we hope you appreciate our well-thought-out procedure. We have had some outrageous requests from tenants, but our procedure is designed to account for that and protect you legally.
Again, please refer us to others you know interested in real estate investing or that are looking for a better property manager!
Image courtesy of Rodney Productions.