Welcome back to PSA Thursday, a mostly-weekly, sometimes-on-Friday segment in which we talk about how to handle money, work, and life in the middle of a pandemic.
This week, we continue the conversation on evictions. No landlord wants to have to evict their tenant. No tenant wants to get evicted. What can we do, upfront, to prevent such issues from happening? That’s the question we explore in this episode.
We discuss what landlords can do to create and maintain open lines of communication with tenants, and why inviting your tenants to communicate with you can help you avoid getting ghosted.
Here’s what we cover in this episode:
- The feedback we received on the last PSA Thursday episode with Alieza Durana
- How to establish open lines of communication with your tenants, before anything goes wrong
- How to talk to your tenants when they experience financial difficulties
- How to ensure that your tenants stay in touch with you until they overcome these difficulties
If you find the strategies in this episode helpful, download our word-for-word scripts on how to communicate with your tenants about financial difficulties. Reference it whenever you need to reach out to your tenants and work on a solution together.
Resources Mentioned:
Dana Wood
Can you speak to eviction moratoriums?
What are the landlords rights
Erin @ Team Afford Anything
Hi Dana – these vary greatly state-by-state. We usually recommend NOLO as a resource: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/emergency-bans-on-evictions-and-other-tenant-protections-related-to-coronavirus.html and https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/state-landlord-tenant-laws should help!
Michael
This episode was much better than the previous one. It gives landlords practical advice to use in actual situations.
The previous episode’s guest could do no better than direct landlords to social services and politicians. She is a policy wonk; she obviously has no experience being a landlord or being in a position where she relies on tenants to pay the rent so she can pay her bills.
While Paula does a great job in this episode in giving actionable information, she highlights that in the previous episode she reached out to “someone grounded in research…the Ivy League universities” and “not some yahoo with an unsubstantiated opinion.” I was one of the critical commenters on the last episode so I re-listened to it so see if I was unfair. I was not, and I believe Paula made a mistake by bringing in a yahoo with a political opinion and no practical experience on the subject. The guest sidestepped most of Paula’s questions and provided absolutely no usual advice. For example, would a landlord that is in rent deferment discussions really direct the tenant to legal services?