do you rent out your basement apartment?

[Anonymous]

I am thinking about renting out our walk out basement level which has sep entrance bed, bath, den, and kitchenette and laundry. Does anyone else have experience with this? How do you advertise and/or otherwise find your tenants? What do you charge? Any advice re what to do, not to do, to keep in mind? Thanks in advance. I am in No. VA.

[Anonymous]

We used to rent out our basement in our old house. I think the most important thing is for you to have a solid 'gut sense'. We were lucky to always have gotten good tenants. In what area of va are you?

[Anonymous]

mclean

[Anonymous]

12:38 here. I know someone who is looking. Can you leave an email?

[Anonymous]

sorry. it won't be ready for a few months. we have to finish renovating the bath and fix a couple things in the kitchenette. plus, i've got to convince my hubby that a renter would be worth it. i was just sending out a feeler post. but thank you for the interest.

[Anonymous]

I live in the District so I can't advise you on Virginia law but there are serious District requirements that people can run afoul of. People do rent basement apartments out anyway but getting caught not following DC regulations (occupancy codes, business license, paying taxes on income) can mess everything up. Be sure you are aware of what your local municipality requires.

We rent through Craig's list. I bought a rental application off the web and modified it to fit our situation. It asks for current and former landlord contact info, personal reference, work and salary info, bank info, car info. I felt uncomfortable asking for all that but it does help give you a full picture of who this person is. Then I do follow up phone calls to the landlords, the company they work for (to confirm they work there and can afford my rent), and the personal reference.

I've also gotten pretty good at looking up criminal records on my own. In DC there's a court record search (found one prospective tenant had been evicted when he said he hadn't). If you google your city/county name along with the term court records you may find you can do this search on line.

If the person has a unique enough name, you can also find out a fair bit about someone through googling them generally.

I haven't done a credit check on anyone. Some landlords ask for some money to do a credit check. So far, confirming the information through phone calls has worked well enough.

It's hard to ask for all that detail on an application and hard to get used to calling people to follow up. But it's your basement and you want to feel comfortable about having them there.

Another option is work with a property management service who will advertise and select tenants for a fee. When we rented out our old house, that helped us a lot because we would have fallen for some sob stories and the property management people were tougher than we were. I've toughened up since then so I can say "no" to the sob stories but I still don't like it!

Good luck, OP!

[Anonymous]

thanks for the great advice!

[Anonymous]

I also rent my basement. 13:10 has given you very insightful advise. to add to that it is important to clarify if you want only one person there. Personally I felt more comfortable renting to single women and in all three occasions everything worked fine. We are in Kensington, Maryland and I charge $950 without utilities for a basement similar to yours.