A Landlord has a lot of expensive maintenance items to deal with; water heaters, heat pumps, roofs, carpet, etc. However, I’ve found that there is one maintenance item that is the most expensive by far: painting. It’s easy to miss that, since cheap paint may run $10-$12 a gallon, and replacing the compressor on a heat pump can easily run $750 or more. There are two reasons that painting is the number #1 maintenance budget killer 1) It is time intensive. It takes about two hours of labor to replace a water heater. My experience is that it takes a competent painting crew about 50 labor hours to do one of our 1000 square foot duplex units. While you’re obviously going to pay the plumber a higher rate on the water heater, that 50 hours really adds up. 2) You’re going to do it over and over. And over. One of the most frustrating experiences in real estate is to work hard painting a rental unit, and then find yourself right back there a few months later after some deadbeat tenant has skipped out (and you find out that they had a penchant for nailing lots of large nails and their kids like to crayon the walls). One deadbeat that only stayed in one of our units for a couple of months before we evicted him had put in over a hundred nails in the wall. Because painting will likely be your biggest recurring expense, it pays off to find ways to be efficient about it. This several part series on painting will show you how to save those precious maintenance dollars.
The first thing is to pick one basic color and stick with it. Don’t try to be a decorator with your rental units. The color you will pick is white. Not antique white, not bright white, not sandstone white. Just white. Tenants will complain that white is boring (though I disagree), but when you are showing the units nice white paint says “clean” in their subconscious, and a bright room looks bigger and is psychologically more positive. As an aside, you will have tenants who ask you if they can paint. They’ll tell you what great decorators they are, how they’ll repaint when they move, how much it means to them. It will all sound very nice. Your answer, always, is “no”. That can’t be emphasized enough. It is always “no”. Even if the tenant asks you if they can touch up using your paint, the answer is no, but you can have it done for them (for cost). After a couple of times repainting a room a tenant has painted black or orange (I’ve been there), or where the tenant painted over the outlet and switch covers, door knobs, and pretty much everything (been there too), you’ll share my pain. Sometime I’ll entertain you with a collection of painting horror stories. Bottom line is that a tenant can do more damage – in terms of the time and money it costs you to fix it – with a can of paint and some good intentions than vandals with bad intentions.
A few fundamentals about painting: there are two kinds of paint, oil based and latex (water) based. Life for you will be simple – never use oil based paint to paint the interior of a rental unit. There are also two kinds of paint: interior and exterior. We’re talking about interior painting, although in some brands using an exterior paint on the interior is OK. There are also two kinds of paint: cheap stuff and quality stuff. I’ve tried the cheap stuff. It ends up costing too much money, because it’s more likely to require a second (or third) coat. Saving $5 a gallon doesn’t look like such a bargain when it doubles your labor time with a second coat.
You want to use the same brand, same color (white) every time. What you’re hoping for is to merely have to touch up the paint job next time you come back, rather than redo every square inch. This is important also because turn-around time on getting the unit ready can be critical. It’s hard to rent something that isn’t finished with the cleaning and painting.
Next time: Primers, paint textures, and what brand I use.
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