How should a Landlord handle renewals during COVID?

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So no matter what state you’re in, right? Currently, there’s COVID legislation about regulating evictions. So if you have a tenant who’s not paying rent, you’re kind of in a different situation, right? You’re probably not getting that annual inspection and you’re not able to do all this other stuff. You’re in the special pocket pandemic related and you can’t do all the normal things that you’d be doing for your landlord business, but if you’re in the other pocket, right? You’ve got tenants paying rent, and you’re trying to figure out how do I navigate this renewal during COVID ’cause the tenants don’t want to let me in to do the inspection and am I even allowed to require them to sign a renewal?

So I think, well, I just want to start with the people who are dealing with the folks who aren’t paying rent. So you want to just make sure you check with and keep up to date with your local state legislation, be aware of the dates that they’re putting out there in terms of being able to file out claims, et cetera and when some of these restrictions if there are any subset.

So that’s number one.

Number two, if you have a tenant that’s otherwise been paying rent and following through on their obligations to your property and you want to renew with them, then I would say the upside of renewal with a tenant like that is that you have them locked in for a set period of time. So I would do that and it does get a little bit murky when it comes to rent increases because you don’t want them to start claiming COVID hardship or not be able to pay rent. So my suggestion right now, and for at least for this year is to keep the rent the same. That would be my recommendation and keep them happy. If you’re otherwise enjoying the relationship with them, keep them happy and if you need to do the renewal and their refusing to let you in which I think is the question, right? You wanna do the inspection, scheduled time with them to do a FaceTime tour. It’s something that they can do with you. You can send them the checklist in advance that you have things that you want them to look at while you’re on the phone. You just follow through with them. So you say,” Hey, listen, “Tenant, today let’s go through the bathrooms “and the kitchen and show me things. “I want to look underneath the sinks. “So just show me via video “I need to look at what the sink looks like”. You can notice things on a video like leaks or things that are falling apart.