I used this company to manage three of my properties. They did well for a while but in the end things went very bad. This is what happened.
One day I drove past one of my rental homes that had been rented out for a couple of years and saw a For Rent sign in the window. I hadn't been informed that the tenants were moving out and when I called to find out what happened they said the tenants had moved out a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit upset because I don't like surprises. Normally I post an ad in craigslist even before tenants move out and I usually start repair work the day after tenants move out. Also since the house was back on an easement virtually no one except the next door neighbors would see the For Rent sign. The Rental Connections (RC) failure to notify me that the tenants had moved out and failure to truly advertise had probably cost me a month in rent. This was the first of many problems that would follow.
Luckily the tenants had kept the inside of the house in almost perfect condition so there wasn't much work to do on the inside. It only need yard work because the back lawn had been killed by fallen leaves that weren't raked up.
I put an ad in craigslist right away with The Rental Connection's contact number and had sod installed in the backyard. I couple of weeks later RC contacted me and said they had perspective tenants that were relatives of someone that worked at RC that were relocating from out of state and asked if it was ok for that family rent the home in about a month. Assuming there had been no other prospects and that credit checks and all that were done I said ""ok"".
The day after the new tenants moved in I received a complaint. Some of the sod that was placed down in the backyard had has been turned over by a raccoons looking for worms. I went there to turn the sod back over and talk to one of the tenants. That's when I found out she was the niece of the owner of RC. At that moment alarms started going off in my head. I make it a point not to rent to friends or relatives and I wondered why the owner of RC would make that error in judgment. I began to wonder if RC had intentionally not advertised my home to buy time for the owner's niece to move there. I became worried that if things went wrong I would not be represented fairly and that is exactly what happened.
The tenant turned out to be a renter from hell. I won't go into all the details but eight months and $8000 of damage later a representative from RC called me up and asked if I wanted to ask the tenants to leave. Knowing that this would break the lease and they would get their deposit back I said ""no"" and said I would wait until the end of the lease. The very next day the tenants broke the lease. I also later found out that the RC connection allowed them to falsify the move-in-walk-through report where they reported non-existent damage in anticipation that they might do it. This left me with no legal recourse to collect for damages. In fact, my only recourse was to take my business elsewhere and put this complaint on Yelp.
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