Onsite Insight
Rental Turnovers: The Ultimate Education
by Riley
I do not have a huge amount of turnover in the building I manage. Perhaps two or three will vacate during a busy year, and they are usually from the same units. Every so often, one of the old timers will shuffle off to Florida or Idaho to retire and a long, long, long-term turnover must be performed. It is much like a surgery: delicate and refined in the end, but in the beginning you just need to open it up and shift the “guts” to the twenty-first century. Each unit is different and each turnover takes on a life of its own. Entry to one of these units can be like walking into a carnival; some can be a house of horrors and some a house of mirrors, distorted and a little off.
My first turnover on one of these relics came about 10 years ago. It was a clean, well-kept unit. The gentleman living there from the birth of the building kept a neat house; however, each room contained something that someone in the early sixties thought was the newest, latest and greatest. The cupboards were in perfect condition thanks to the tenant’s care. I just needed to get rid of the ugly and cracked orange finish. The hardwood underneath was perfect and beautiful after the refinishing.
The oven and range top was a dusty pink, matching the refrigerator; someone at some time in the sixties thought a pink matching set was fashionable design. To me, it was the most unappetizing cook top ever seen. Just the mere thought of cooking tomato sauce, in all of its red glory, on that stove made me cringe.
I tested the cook top to see if, after three decades, it still worked; to my amazement, it was in perfect working order. At that point, I was faced with a dilemma: replace a perfectly good stove and oven just because they are too ugly to look at or leave them in the unit for the perfect retro-loving tenant. In the end, I made the decision to replace it, mainly because the refrigerator definitely had to go, as it was a frost and ice collector that required extended defrost sessions with gallons of boiling water. Once the pink refrigerator was gone, the pink stove lost its questionable charm.
The bathroom in the unit had also passed its prime. It was a large space designed so poorly that it felt small. The shower had no tub—it was one of three units in a very large building designed this way. It was a huge tiled affair that took up at least a third of the bathroom, but because the inset was small, the inside was claustrophobic and dark. Next to the shower was an oddly placed vanity—a good idea in concept, but so awkwardly set in a corner that there was no room to use a chair and look in the mirror. To use the vanity mirror, I had to wedge myself between it and the huge shower by edging in crablike and slightly squatting. Using this amenity was a bit like being a giant at a midget’s sink.
New carpet was needed, as the old carpet was original and bald down to the backing. It also needed new paint, because it hadn’t been painted since the building was new. After it was all over, it cost well over $15,000 to bring this unit up to date. Was it worth it? Of course it was, as this new pristine unit rented immediately. The remodel was beautiful; I still covet the new bathroom, with its huge soak tub, giant storage closet and shiny new tile.
The unit also received new curtains, new paint and a new apartment smell that rivaled the new car smell one wants to keep for as long as possible. It was a successful turnover that cost a huge amount of money but made my job of renting the unit at top dollar as easy as possible. Even though this unit has turned over twice since then, it needed no work and rented quickly.
My second real turnover was not as easy. As I’ve mentioned before in this column, I have had tenants who have not told me of issues, big and small, and it has cost the building. One morning when I was leaving for work, I noticed a small note lying on the floor outside my apartment door. It said, “There is water.” It was from a tenant in a two-bedroom apartment that had been remodeled and did not need any work.
I went downstairs to the apartment in question and knocked on the door, hearing the shower running in the unit. With no answer, and with trepidation as to what, “There is water,” meant, I opened the door and announced myself. There was no answer and when I entered the unit I understood why. There was no one in the apartment and the shower was not running. Instead, the ceiling in the living room and the kitchen was bulging with water, no longer at ceiling level but down under my eye line and filled with water.
I ran to a telephone and called my contractor; by the time he arrived, the ceiling had fallen down in the living room, kitchen and one of the two bedrooms. The unit was destroyed.
There was nothing left to work with. The tenant, who luckily had no possessions in the unit, as she was an exchange student barely living there, immediately moved out without suing the building.
It turned out that the carpet company working upstairs had hammered a carpet tack into a heating system pipe located in the floor in the unit above the one destroyed. It had been slowly accumulating water in the ceiling for three days. The tenant saw the bulge in the ceiling but said nothing until it was in an emergency state. In the end, the carpet company paid for all of the damage, as their weak argument that they did not know the pipe was there did not hold up. They actually laid the carpet around the pipe and did not have much to say when I pointed out the obvious flaw in their argument.
The damage was severe and the amount of time repairing a unit that at one time had no ceilings or walls was endless. A huge amount of time was spent badgering vendors to pay for damages, and sniping at those vendors trying to work in a unit that no longer existed.
This was a turnover that I would rather not go through again. Everything was destroyed, from appliances, cabinets, walls, ceilings and carpet. But, looking back at this time, it actually worked out well. The tenant moved out without fuss. If she had stayed, the relocation costs during the construction would have been extreme and the suit for damages could have outweighed that. Plus, the vendor eventually paid for the damages and the cost of rebuilding. Still, I am lucky that I don’t have many turnovers like this.
Every major turnover is different and every one is an education, but I still feel lucky I do not see many of them. My old timers rarely leave, and the young tenants do not stay long enough to leave their units so outdated that the guts need to be removed.
I have had very few horrible experiences and my education in rental turnovers, from pink stoves to total carnage, has been one of limited exposure. Putting a rental unit on the market is always different, but for me has been rarely painful. Being a resident manager is a complete education, not a crash course.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. “Riley” has been a San Francisco resident manager in a large, well cared for building for 12 years. The names of the tenants, as well as the columnist, have been changed to protect the building and all involved from the court system and irate neighbors. Copyright © 2008 SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.