Pub. 4 2019 Issue 5

7 ISSUE 5 2019 What are the disadvantages of renting to students? • You may have a hard time filling units during the sum- mer season when students are off earning money for the next academic year. • Many students have never rented before. You have no rental history to check, and you may not have an employ- ment history, either. • Students are often still very young and immature. They’ve never lived on their own before, free of parental control. Sometimes their judgment is poor. Sometimes they don’t really know basics such as cleaning. • Some students don’t understand the value of the prop- erty, and they abuse it. They figure they’re there for the short term, and they are less likely to take care of it in a responsible way. • Student rentals can be noisy because of parties. Although parties may be unavoidable, especially at party schools, other tenants probably won’t like the noise. • If you are covering the utilities, they may not care about minimizing costs. To minimize the disadvantages, you have some options : • Rent by the bed. If one person is late with rent, that’s only one person. The impact is less than it would be if you were getting rent from an entire family and the family failed to pay. • Find out whether the student has been evicted from a dormitory. • Have an attorney write a good lease, and create a version that includes the parents or someone else who is financially stable as co-signers so you can hold them responsible when necessary. There should be clauses about the number of occupants that can be in a rental, rules about noise, and a process for making and paying for repairs. Prohibit weapons (including BB guns and paintball guns). Make rules about things that wouldn’t be necessary in, say, 10 years, such as not climbing on the roof, burning candles, setting fires or setting off fireworks, and using charcoal grills. Make sure your contact information for any co-signers is current. • Go over the lease with the student. Good communication about rules and the consequences for breaking the rules can prevent many problems. • Enforce the lease and be thorough in your duties as landlord. • Ask for a larger deposit than you would for someone old- er. Check to see whether your state limits the amount of the security deposit you can collect, and consider asking for as much as is legally possible. • Let the students pay the utility bills so that they won’t run the heater or air conditioner too much. • Evaluate the parents as well as the students. Responsible parents are more likely to raise responsible children. Run the credit report on the parents and the children. You should be interested in credit history, criminal history, employment history, and references. • Make regular visits to the rental so students know you are there. You might be able to catch problems early, and your tenants are more likely to respect the rules you’ve set if they know they might be caught for breaking them. Consider hiring someone who, in exchange for free rent, will monitor what’s going on in the building. Continued on page 8 Since most students have a choice between living in a dorm and living somewhere else, the choice to live in an apartment or a house tells you that they would rather have some privacy than be on campus, even though living on campus is incredibly convenient.