I haven’t been keeping up with this blog as well as I’d like. I’ve been off work since late October. I should have been writing more often. I’ve been busy with all kinds of things. Some interesting, most not so much.

We got hit pretty hard by Hurricane Beryl last July. It really wasn’t a very strong hurricane, but it did a lot of damage around my area. My town is a “tree city” USA and pretty proud of it’s beautiful old oak trees.

Beryl took out a huge number of them this year. I’m not sure why so many this time. The wind was much less than the last few storms we’ve had. Those trees did a lot of damage when they came down. Lots of power lines down, lots of roofs damaged. My neighbor had a tree take out half their house. I guess the insurance company figured a total loss since the house was completely removed. Even the foundation is gone now. A friend had a tree wipe out his garage and his 2 classic cars in there. 

I was lucky that nothing major happened to my house, but instead Beryl caused chaos with my rentals. I have a total of 14 rental units- 13 had damage. Five had major damage. I have windstorm insurance which is supposed to cover this sort of thing. I guess I’m better off than the people in California.

Those poor people had their insurance canceled right before the latest fires burned down their homes. I wasn’t canceled. They still want to collect their payments. I only bothered to file claims on 2 properties. I didn’t figure the repair costs would reach the deductibles on the others.

I filed on those 2 properties. The insurance company completely denied everything on one building. It’s a 4-plex apartment building. It had roof leaks in 3 different places and the ceiling fell to the floor in 2 of those places. I’m glad nobody was there at the time.

They said it wasn’t due to the storm. WTF??? What else would it be? Ceilings just decided to fall down one day for no reason at all? It just happened to be the same day of the hurricane? 

I also filed on a small house.They decided to cover the carport and part of the roof where a tree fell through it. But not the water damage to the bedroom where a window blew out and ruined the walls, carpet and floors? 

I don’t think I will renew either flood or windstorm insurance after finally making a claim. Finding out how poorly they respond. Seems that unless it’s a total loss, it’s better to self insure.

So, I’ve been super busy working on all those damaged properties trying to get them in shape again. Almost all my tenants moved out, either right before or soon after the storm. Actually glad to get rid of 3 since they hadn’t paid rent for previous 2 months! Out of those 14 units, I’ve only had 4 rented since August. The stress has been killing me, trying to scrounge up the money to fix things. 

At this point, I’ve managed to get 5 units ready to rent. One of those got snapped up immediately. I don’t know why, but nobody is even calling about the other 4. I had another one almost ready to go. It was one where the ceiling fell in because of a roof leak. Everything was done waiting on a roofer to fix the leak. It was a spot just about 2 ft square.

For some reason I can’t fathom, the roofers decided to take off the entire roof. So then the ceiling came down in the entire kitchen and half the living room! Drywall and pink insulation everywhere! It’s finally stopped leaking (I think) and so now we can start over and repair the drywall, paint, etc again. 

I have another unit almost ready. We’ve just been working on trying to figure out the rats nest of water lines running through the building. I want to have all the old ones removed and only the ones that work properly left. It’s taking a while to sort it out but I think we’ve finally got that problem solved. 

All I’m hoping for now is to find some decent tenants. It would be great to find some that would actually pay the rent. Maybe even not completely trash the property?

I don’t know if I’d still have bought rental property if I’d known then what I know now. I never thought it would be this much trouble. I had hoped to just do basic maintenance. Little by little upgrade as people moved out, but it hasn’t worked out that way at all. If every landlord has issues like I’ve had I don’t know how land-lording has survived for as long as it has. I guess I must just be super unlucky.