Ardent Renting

I don’t recommend renting rooms out of your home unless you are desperate for the money to keep the house. It is an unstable financial income in the State of Sunny Florida. I’m talking about renting a room out where you are also living. I’m talking about ‘ in your face’ living together with total unknowns.

In this blog, I’m only listing the Cons: .

1. Renting a room is a crap-shoot gamble on personalities you are not related to but stuck with nevertheless. It’s a place that’s no longer your own castle. Privacy is certainly curtailed when you have strangers that live with you. That goes for both of you.

2. If you get a person who does not clean up, you cannot evict them on that alone. Mostly, in the State of Florida, you can evict for about $400 if the roommate fails to pay rent. That’s after you have done all the eviction procedures leading up to that. That includes the 3-day notice tacked on a door in your house.

3. If you get a petty thief, you have to work hard to catch them in the act with a recording device and video and proof that you owned the item.

4. If they bring in a dog,  you have to make sure the dog is wormed, defleaed and doesn’t use your yard as a convenient toilet. If the dog is of any large breed mixed with Pitbull, you also have to be certain the rabies injections are current and the dog is wearing the tag at all times. Furthermore, you must also place signs all over your property, “Beware of Dog”, even if that dog is benign and friendly. The problem is that if a burglar burgles your property and the dog bites that burglar on your behalf, the burglar has the right to sue you. If you have all the documentation, you get exonerated. However, if not, you pay the burglar.

5. The phone interviews are both scary and hysterical, in the clinical definition.

I had a call recently from a person who makes a good living playing poker.

A while back, a man said he’s a nudist and would put clothes on when children came over.

Or how about the man who kept on calling me back demanding a reason why I rejected him.

Then the southern belle who swore a clean background check but wound up with fraudulent check passing.

A recovered addict can be a good renter provided there is real time between the Halfway House and you. If it’s less than provable 5 years of being clean and working, it’s not a good bet.

Single Moms and their sons in the same bed is a set up for weirdness. Imagine a mother and son having to sleep in this bed together. A son who is 18.

Definitely do not rent to anyone who is being sponsored by a parent because you would have to do double-time when the person complains to their parents about you. And eviction is much harder.

My advice is this: when you get a renter, have a committee of friends and advisers who can help catch your ‘blind spots”. Do the background check, call all the work and previous living letters of recommendation; buy and install locks on your bedroom doors and pray all goes well.