In now our 15th year in business as a landlord, property manager, and property provider, the fundamentals of what we do remain the same, however, many parts of our business evolve and improve yearly. The biggest evolution is our property renovation. Before I sat down to write this week’s post, I looked through several old hard drives looking for pictures of my first rental, but no such luck finding these.
We purchased a tired property and once our reno was done, it was still tired–.29 cent stick on tile, .75 cent a sq. ft carpet and $6 lights doesn’t add much to a home. It didn’t take long to realize that our tenants looked like our houses. Sub-par tenants accept sub-par homes, which resulted in us chasing rents and constant maintenance.
We tied back our problems to offering sub-par homes, thus overhauling our renovation process. Those changes allowed us to get the results we had set out to get when we started our journey of building a real estate portfolio. As we started offering a few Turnkey homes in 2009, we took our mistakes and evolved our renovation even more.
Our core values have always been to offer the best renovated homes in our markets, which means a constant review of our renovation process and specs. What was accepted as a superior renovation in 2009 would struggle to find tenants today.
Why? Competition.
More property owners doing the right things and more tenants who do not accept sub-par homes. Every Monday morning, we talk through this process to get better and make sure we continue to evolve.
Check out the evolution from one our homes in 2010 that was considered an excellent renovation to a home we recently completed in 2021. Night and day!