Nice one Peter.
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Life as a Landlord
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You are a great writer, Peter. Must be a book in there somewhere. Well done on making the MSM.
Life and death (OK and taxes). It's the biography that counts, not the number of years on the planet. If the biography is complete nothing else matters.
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TINZ - Tenancy Information NZ.
Free subscription with your local PIA membership, so you only pay the cost of each search.
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It was a quiet Saturday morning here in suburbia. We intended to travel down to Tauranga and stay with friends there overnight, returning home late the next day. As I meandered out to the letterbox to get the morning paper, I was mentally planning the trip.
Hello, what’s this? Our garage roller door was sitting about one third open. It’s normally either open or shut and won’t stop part way, so the damn thing must have gone wrong somehow.
Rescuing the paper from the box I went back inside and through to the garage interior entrance door. When I opened it and went through to the garage itself, my heart sank. The place had been pillaged. Stuff I had piled up and been unpiled, stuff that had been scattered was piled. No broken windows or signs of forced entry, so how the hell did they get in to do that?
I had parked my car outside, in the driveway, the night before to prepare for an reasonably early departure. Now I could see how they had managed to get into the garage. The car had been entered and comprehensively ransacked. Even the fusebox cover had been pulled off, presumably to see if I habitually kept a fifty dollar note tucked away in there. The GPS – stolen. My jacket – stolen. My thousand dollar bifocal driving glasses – stolen. The sunvisor document holder – stolen. And of course, the garage door remote – stolen. So they had used that to get into the garage.
Inside the garage, my wife’s car had also been pillaged. Fortunately, no credit cards or other valuables had been left in that. A lot of the boxes and bags had been pulled down in the garage. Before Christmas I had shouted myself quite an expensive new Cessna zip-up bag, which I had so far not used. That was gone. There might be other things gone, you don’t really know until you actually go looking for something and realize that it must have become part of the haul.
After phoning the police to report the event, I realized that my NZDF base security pass had been in the document holder so that had gone also. That pass is a controlled document, and I could almost hear the shriek of the alarm sirens going off when I had to report its loss. After that rather difficult conversation, even the Police called back to get the details on it. Took me about a week of dashing around and receiving plenty of sour looks to get a replacement.
Slow as a toad, I then remembered that I had taken my box of rental property keys out of the landlording van and put them in the car. This was just in case some tenant rang over the weekend, and I needed to call into that property on my way back home on Sunday. Bad move. The keys were gone. All labelled, of course. Some were identified just by numbers, but I knew that a few of them had the house address on the label, and - shock horror - I could not recollect which ones they were. I would need to replace the lot.
That is a challenging task, I can tell you. Firstly, I had to text all of the tenants telling them of the theft and that there was a real risk that the bad boys could come calling. Then I had to assemble a list of all the properties and the tenants contact details and send that all through to my tame locksmiths. They were very good, and managed to get in touch with all of the tenants on Monday and had everything sorted within the next few days, while all I could do was adopt my ‘John Cleese in panic mode’ interpretation.
Of course, each rekeying entailed a cost. On that particular property. Just a couple of hundred each, but multiply that by the number of properties and you are looking at two grand. We have filed an insurance claim under our house contents policy, but of course the GPS loss falls under the car policy (again, the replacement cost is less than the excess, so no luck there) and as far as I can tell, each rekeying exercise is a separate claim on each rental property. I suspect the worse, as and when all the insurance people duck for cover.
So what are life’s lessons there? Firstly, never leave your garage door remote in the car when parked outside the garage. Makes it all too easy for Bill the burglar. Sure, they can break a window, but this particular exercise has all the hallmarks of a professional job, quick in and out, no noise to disturb us as we slept, and no attempt to enter into the house itself. They obviously realize that an illegal entry without actually breaking anything will rate very low on the Police time-and-effort work roster. Even the car bears no signs of damage, a skilled man at work there.
Secondly, guard your rental property keys with your life. Sure, you will need to label them somehow, but invent some sort of cryptic code so that only you know which key goes with which property or your locksmith could well be planning his next world trip, first class, on your bank account.
So my total loss from this event, at this stage, seems to add up to nearly three thousand. With that, and my next week Manurewa house roof replacement at fifteen thousand, I may be taking a cut lunch to work this year. And then it gets worse. Flying back to home base a few days ago I had to drop into the Stratford airfield to refuel. Their avgas pump won’t take a fuel card, just MasterCard or Visa. I paid thus, and checked the bill a few days later. $8522.00 thank you very much. They’re mad, the bastards.
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Ouch... sorry to hearFree online Property Investment Course from iFindProperty, a residential investment property agency.
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Thanks for the details of your misadventures and good luck with the insurance claim - there certainly is a lesson or two in it for all of us as we slip into autopilot mode in life as things get busy.
i often go out to my car in the morning to see my wallet on the passenger seat in full view.
i have however gotten into the habit of taking the second set of keys (to the other car) with me when we go away for any overnight travel - no point leaving a getaway vehicle keys at the front door should someone break in.
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B@stards. I hope that the insurance people are reasonable.My blog. From personal experience.
http://statehousinginnz.wordpress.com/
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Originally posted by flyernzl View PostBut I have managed to negotiate the Stratford fuel bill down from $8522.00 to $138.36, so that's got to be a win.My blog. From personal experience.
http://statehousinginnz.wordpress.com/
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Originally posted by MichaelNZ View PostThere is your problem.
Originally posted by sidinz View PostThat's some negotiation! Or was the pump faulty?
And I could wave my printed receipt for the correct amount at them.
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