Picking The Place To Rent

Finding a place to rent can be stressful. Growing up I heard in movies and from others about “slumlords”. These are basically landlords that let their properties go to waste while tenants are still renting them. When I first moved out of my parents house I was concerned about this. Are all landlords slumlords? How do I know what place I should rent. I wasn’t sure. I ended up renting a one bedroom apartment in a nice quiet area and it turned out to be great. In the three years I lived there, I only had one issue and it was fixed that day.

Before I moved out to Colorado we got a list of places to look at during our scouting trip. The first one we were going to look at was promising and I figured that would be the place. The week before we flew out to Colorado there was a shooting in the parking lot. We skipped past that one. It could happen anywhere, but since we didn’t know the area we weren’t going to risk it. It turns out we didn’t look at any of the properties we planned on viewing. Instead we found 4 other ones on the south side of Aurora. The place we settled on was a big complex with 20 something buildings, a pool, gym, etc. Like the previous place we only had one issue. After a trip back to Michigan we noticed our kitchen faucet was leaking just a little bit. I submitted a work order online even stating it was a minor drip and not an emergency. Within 2 hours it was being fixed.

Now we are up in Loveland. So far we have had two issues. The first one was last September when the Big Thompson (and other rivers) flooded. Our basement ended up with several feet of water in it. He hopped on it pretty quick draining the water and getting a crew in to do the cleanup, replace the drywall, hot water heater, furnace, etc. Overall we spent 2 – 2 ^1/2 weeks away. Fast-forward to this week and we had a second issue. Our washer decided to dump water everywhere earlier in the day. I called him in the evening and about 7:45 the next morning here was over working on it. Before he left I apologized for getting him over here so early and he had been up and waiting for a few hours already. That made me feel kind of bad because I had been up that long. There is also some concern that the runoff from the mountains will cause the river to flood again. We will be watching that for the next few weeks. Driving by one of the smaller rivers you can see that it looking a bit full as is.

Having rented 3 place now I am at ease of finding a “slumlord”. The issue in Loveland is that places go fast as the rental industry seems to be booming. We are hoping the next time we move it will be into a house we own.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net