Jennifer L. Johnson, Crystal Lake Lawyer answers the following question: “Is it worthwhile or advantageous to rent my property?”
Jennifer L. Johnson: ” Hi, my name is Jennifer Johnson, and I’m a partner here at Zanck, Coen, Wright and Saladin. I’ve been with the firm since 2005. I concentrate my area of practice in landlord/tenant law, real estate, general civil litigation, construction litigation, and I also handle some traffic offenses.
One of the other questions that I get oftentimes relative to landlord/tenant law is, is it worthwhile or advantageous as a landlord, for me to rent my property?
One of the upsides to renting a property is, with the crash that the market took several years ago now, a lot of the property values are still working toward rebounding, but haven’t rebounded yet. So a lot of times I think people choose to rent their property to recoup some of the value, as the property values begin to rise, until they can sell it for a price point that would work for them.
So certainly the alternative is the property sitting vacant, it would make more sense to have a tenant in place, generally speaking, and having rent income coming in, versus like I said, the property sitting vacant.
With that being said, it’s always important to have a written lease. You’ve got protections with a written lease as a landlord. Your Lessee would have written protections as well with a written lease. You’ve got a rent amount that’s set, there’s less room for ambiguity. You’ve got a lease term that’s set, and like I said, you’ve got some more protections.
The only down side, if there is one, to a written lease is, if you want to terminate it, it’s difficult as a landlord to terminate the lease early, before the end of the lease term, unless you get a tenant that isn’t paying rent or is violating the terms of the lease.
Without a lease in place, a written lease, then oftentimes you can terminate the lease, if it’s a month-to-month lease, within 30 days’ notice if you’re just done with renting the property.
There could be the possibility if you have a rental property, and you decide that you want to sell it, that you could sell it and allow the new buyers, if you had a buyer that was interested, to assume that lease. So you could keep the tenant in place, sell the property, the new buyer could potentially take over the lease, and then that way you could move forward with keeping the property with a tenant in there as well.
So just things to consider and to think about. You know, certainly if you don’t want to keep the tenant in the property and you’d like to sell the property, you want to make sure that you talk to a real estate agent about the logistics of doing that. And oftentimes you may want to make sure that your lease term with your tenant is ending prior to of course any closing date that may be set once you get an offer and accept an offer to purchase for the property.”
Jennifer L. Johnson can be reached at (815) 459-8800 ext 652 and [email protected]
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