COVID-19 Tenant Payment Performance Update through September 2021
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
Politicians just seem to be willing to do anything for publicity and votes. Several politicians have introduced bills at the federal and state levels to increase roadblocks to landlords evicting tenants.
It seems liberals are intent on giving away free housing, at the expense of taxpayers, landlords, and common sense. None of the bill reviews we’ve seen so far put in protections for landlords against tenants intent on scamming the system!
For our clients with properties in the City of Detroit, 36th District Court – the judges seem to have implemented their own unofficial eviction moratorium. They are continuously adjourning eviction cases instead of granting judgments and are not signing Writs. They are also refusing to evict tenants if the landlord doesn’t have the Certificate of Compliance from the city, yet are not following their own rules about requiring these tenants to escrow their rents. We spoke to an attorney recently who is suing 36th District Court in Circuit Court to force these judges to do their job and enforce the law. We’ll keep you updated on this case.
GOVERNMENT AID FOR PAST DUE TO TENANTS
In the month of September, we received over $80,000 in COVID Emergency Rental Assistance (CERA) checks! Approvals are also picking up.
If you’re waiting on these funds, please pay attention to the communications we post on your portal. Several of our clients seem to ignore our communications and contact us wanting updates we’ve already given them. While we pride ourselves on our communication efforts, this just SLOWS us down!
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 September 30, 2021
We added 37 units last month, again many of them with nonpaying tenants that our competition gave up on chasing for rent. We’ve been able to get several of them to pay September rent and/or start their CERA applications. Overall, all the metrics improved, mostly due to our CERA collections.
Macomb County: The nonpaying units we just took over dropped our numbers here a bit, but the rest of our tenants performed well.
Oakland County: Really no changes here.
Wayne County: We had some really good news here as several tenants that were paying partial rent, were approved for CERA, paying their rents in full! The tenants paying nothing continue to be a challenge, especially given what we mentioned above about 36th District Court.
Tenants with past due balances are starting to communicate and cooperate with the CERA application process. We’ve even had several nonpaying tenants move out! We continue to apply pressure and won’t stop until they either pay or vacate.
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 makes 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 Kindel Media