Who’s got the Keys?

It’s a Tuesday night, you’ve got 3 people coming to see your rental property, that’s pretty good for a November, you rush home from work, grab a quick bite to eat, see your kids and race out the door. You get all the way to the property, and then….

Crap!

The keys! I forgot the keys!

What do you do?

Well, you can turn around and head home and go get them?

But what if your property is on the other side of town, or in a different town? Do you have the time?

You can cancel the showings and re-book them?

But what happens if they don’t rebook?

There has to be a different way, well a few years ago I was that guy. Running around in chaos, completely disorganized and on more than one occasion showed up with no keys.

If you really want a funny story, one time, I actually rented a house by showing the tenant the house by looking in the windows. Sketchy, right? I’m dead serious, it happened!

So how do you solve this? Simple a lockbox.

After one of these moments I finally had enough. I drove to Home Depot and went on a buying spree, of lockboxes.

I spent close to $500 on those expensive suckers and took them home to my ziplock bag full of keys that I used to keep in a kitchen drawer.

I spent an hour sorting keys and codes and another hour out driving around (with my kids in the car) as I went and installed lockboxes on all the properties.

This was important for many different reasons, first, to solve my absent mindedness but secondly to help with coordinating trades.

You see, no tenant likes to sit around and wait for trades and we all lead these busy, hectic, just in time lives and I’m confident you don’t want to sit around and wait either.

So by simply adding a lockbox and giving your tenants notice that should they not be home, the technician will access the unit via lockbox, that would be more than sufficient. Our tenants love that we are able to do that and it serves as a value added service for them.

Do yourself a favour, don’t be me, spend the money now and add a lockbox. A year from now, you’ll be thanking me!