How do you interview property management companies when they all appear to offer the same service? These 8 questions will help you dig deeper to find gold.

6 Interview Questions to Ask Property Management Companies

How do you interview property management companies when they all appear to offer the same service? Here are 6 questions to ask prospective properties managers to dig deeper and uncover best person for the job of managing your rental home. 

How do you find a property manager that is the right fit for your circumstances and budget? By uncovering who will make your life easier and how they plan to take the stress out of finding and handling tenants for you. So before you sign a contract with a new property manager, here are 7 important questions to ask. 

1. What kind of clients do you typically work with?

This question will help determine the kind of landlords the property manager is experienced in dealing with. If they work with bigger clients and large developers, that might be a sign that they’re a reputable provider. But on the other hand, if they have big clients, are they going to make enough time for individual landlords with just one or two properties? How many properties on average does each manager look after? Depending on their answer, you might want to dig into their approach to working with smaller clients, or what the average duration of a relationship is with individual landlords. 

2. What services are included in your fees? 

Typically a property management company will charge between 6 and 10% of the monthly rent to manage your property. But there is a whole host of essential services that you're going to need that may not be included in this fee. You could be charged for everything from marketing to property inspections, even renewing the lease. This means a low management fee might lead to a stack of hidden costs that you weren't prepared for. 

Belong on the other hand never upcharges for these services.

3. Can you take me through the full process of letting my property?

On the outside, it might seem that all property managers offer the same services. But not all property managers are created equal. What are they using to achieve the best possible market analysis? Are they stuck in the past or using up to date technology to market your home (such as 3D tours and virtual walkthroughs). Ask them to take you through the process of marketing and vetting tenants, as well as how they arrived at your proposed monthly rent. 

4. How do you handle maintenance requests and emergency work? 

Find out what the turnaround time is like for maintenance and urgent repair work on your home if it was needed. Here it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of a hypothetical resident with a pressing emergency – and how that reflects on you, their landlord. If your toilet was leaking, do you think they’d be able to fix the problem fast enough? What kinds of costs would you be facing to use their contractors? 

If a property manager is using modern, digital services to ensure you're paid on time, this is telling. It means they're keeping up with the times and are not regressively old-school or going to leave you waiting for cheques to clear. Find out what kind of financial documentation you can expect to receive to help with your record keeping. You should also find out what the process is if tenants fall behind on their rent, as this could put a serious dent in your cashflow. 

Belong guarantees rent, giving homeowners the choice between getting paid on the first of every month, or receiving the entire year of rent upfront. Regardless of when tenants pay, you can bank on when your rental income is received. 

This is an unpleasant topic of conversation, but better to broach it sooner rather than later. Property managers will typically manage the process, but some will charge for this service or may incur legals costs that are passed on to you. Belong on the other hand offers up to $15,000 in eviction protection for any residents we place. 

If you're questioning the value of property management, Belong is the answer

What if you could ditch property management services to modernize your entire rental experience? Belong does exactly that, combining industry-busting technology with human smarts to make renting lovable for both homeowners and their residents.

Visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

Whether staging for sale or marketing a new rental, you need the 2022 list of tricks and hacks to make your house feel like a palace.

7 of The Best Decor Ideas & Tips To Stage a Room

First impressions are everything, especially when it comes to homes. From your online images to the feeling someone gets when they walk through the door, here are seven ways to stage any room to give a sense of space and comfort. 

Before anyone has even set foot in your home, it's going to be judged on how it looks. Great photos attract people to open homes, but this is where you want to really grab them with a sense of space and comfort so they can picture themselves living there. Just as curb appeal is important, so is the way you stage the rooms within your home. So whether you're looking to make a sale or want to stage your rental for knock-out marketing material that will reduce vacancy time between tenants, check out this guide for staging a room that will attract plenty of eyes.  

How to stage a room for real estate listings

1. Use a divider to give one room, two vibes 

It’s easy to see why open floor plans are so in these days; they make a room feel light and spacious and big. But it’s important to make sure that you don’t lose a sense of coziness and intimacy by going too big. Consider using room dividers that can turn one room into two, each with its own aesthetic and purpose. A large staged living room can also act as a dining room when you use furniture to divide up the space. If the room has a unique architectural feature (for example, slanted ceiling or exposed brick walls), you can use them to help subdivide the space in an elegant and organic way. Another good way to reimagine a room: color-blocking with an accent wall or color-coordinated furniture.

2. Use mirrors to make your staged room feel larger

Reflective surfaces are a tried-and-true way to make a room seem more spacious. But there’s more to it than slapping a piece of glass on the wall; mirrors of different styles, shapes, and sizes will impart their own unique aesthetic impact on your staged room. For instance, a gallery-style mirror wall will give your space an artsy flair, while placing one across from a window will emphasize a room's natural light and highlight outside scenery. Mirrored furniture – another trendy item – will disappear into the background of a room, expanding its visual footprint with a chic, modern flair.

3. Serene color schemes will make your room pop

White paint will help create the perfect blank canvas for your walls, but white’s never just white. In fact there are many different tones and tints favored among architects and designers alike, from eggshell to oyster. With a strong, simple foundation, you have the freedom to use furniture that adds a contrasting hue or texture: Think a soft-green velvet couch or statement lighting fixture. Truly, the sky's the limit when it comes to staged living room color schemes. Consider your area and trendy color schemes when picking the right colors for your real estate. 

4. Use light to brighten your room and make it feel larger

The key to making a room feel spacious is light coming in from all angles. But beware, overhead lighting can be harsh and clinical – hospital-like, in the worst-case scenario. That’s definitely not ideal for a staged room meant to sell your real estate!

Instead, use floor lamps and position them so they fill the room from all corners – it’s a guaranteed way to give your space cozier. One statement overhead lighting fixture, combined with table and floor lamps, will give you options to tweak the lighting scheme depending on the time of day and what the weather’s like outside when you’re hosting an open house. 

Pro Tip: The darker the room you're staging, the flashier the lamps should be – a darker room benefits from bright, metallic materials, while a light one has a bit more wiggle room.

5. Use the height of the ceilings to your advantage

As soon as furniture starts to bump up against its boundaries, like walls and ceilings, the room starts to feel overcrowded. Keep tables, chairs, and centered and away from corners. Then, emphasize the height of your ceilings using tall statement pieces like a vintage lamp or vertical storage space, like this ladder storage shelf.

6. Choose reflective materials for staging furniture

When it comes to vertical surfaces, less is more. A chic glass coffee table or Lucite bar cart can serve as both storage and statement design pieces, but because of the transparency and lightness of the material, they’ll always blend aesthetically with the rest of the room. Your residents will keep their focus on the features that make your home unique, while still having a place to set down a cup of tea or store a bottle of wine.

In addition to staging your home to look stylish and spacious, no one is going to feel any desire for a place that feels or looks dirty. Replace used furnishings with clean staged furniture, deep clean the floors and windows, and add a few accessories that balance the cleanliness with a cozy, lived-in vibe. 

Staging is critical to maximizing the potential of your real estate listing. When listing your house or holding an open house, a clean, staged room with top-notch furniture and decor will go a long way in getting your property the best possible price, sale or rental. 

When you work with Belong, you’ll have access to experts that can help with the entire home staging process, from assembling furniture to home repairs. Belong will even show off your spotless, staged interiors with a virtual open home and 3D tour included. 

Belong is simplifying the rental experience and helping more homeowners reach their financial goals through real estate. Visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

7 Best Decor Ideas & Tips To Stage a Room

These simple, quick and budget-friendly upgrades will help renters fall in love with your home, fast.

4 Simple but Impressive Interior Upgrades For Rental Homes

Homeowners who list their properties with Belong love their homes and want their residents to feel the exact same way. These simple, quick, and budget-friendly upgrades will help renters fall in love with your home much faster. 

Belong is the innovative property management alternative built to minimize vacancy (which is one reason that homeowners love us so much).  But sometimes renovations are necessary.  This shouldn’t be viewed as a burden, but an opportunity to smartly update the property.  Simple, elegant upgrades to the living space can pay dividends immediately, and down the line, making your home that much more attractive to potential residents — many of who are looking for certain creature comforts – and Belong knows from experience what they are.

Though a glamorous walk-in remains the gold standard, most people are keenly aware that finding one is something of a pipe dream. That being said, the many intelligently designed organization systems on the market can make a closet feel luxurious by making the greatest use of the available space.  From Ikea to Wayfair to the Container Store, there are a ton of cost-effective options these days.

Belong is a big advocates of closet systems, because they mean so much to residents. They communicate that the private spaces only they see are as important and cared-for as the living room or the bathroom or the kitchen. It makes them feel great, too, every time open the closet door and see everything so neatly arranged and displayed.

The paradox of climate change: summers are getting hotter, making everyone want to blast the AC 24/7, but you can’t help but feel guilty doing so, knowing the thing that is keeping you cool is also contributing to global warming.  Fortunately there are many new energy-efficient models that should at least mitigate the guilt; there are also new models that run quieter, so you can have a Zoom call without shouting.  We’ve also seen models that hang below the window frame, allowing the maximum amount of light to pour in through the windows.  Because what’s summer without a little summer sun?

Redoing the floors can be costly and time-consuming. There is a fashionable solution though: vinyl stickers that you can cut to measure and stick onto the floor. Of course you can do this throughout the entire apartment, but we recommend starting in the kitchens and the bathrooms. Why?  First of all, the tiles you find on the floors of many bathrooms and kitchens are so 80s; second of all, those floors tend to take a beating, so why not redo them on the cheap — especially if the results look anything but!

Adding molding and/or trims to walls/windows/cupboards can be an affordable way to instantly give an elegant, charming lift to a space. Picture rail trims invite tenants to add their own artwork to personalise a space, but even if they go unused, they have an aesthetic value in and of itself. You can also use thin, contrasting trim to open up and lighten a space - so we recommend avoiding thick or wooden trim which can look heavy and dated. 

Belong can make the upgrades and find the right tenants

Even if people aren’t actively looking for these kinds of upgrades, the fact that the homeowners care about their home — and their next residents —makes the place that much more desirable. When you've taken the time to upgrade your property, you need a committed partner who can ensure you can capture the value in your monthly rent. By partnering with Belong, we can assist with upgrades and renovations to your rental and find someone to love it, fast. 

With outdoor entertaining becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the question for landlords becomes, “How can I make my backyard as comfortable as possible?” And we got your back!

5 Affordable Outdoor Hacks To Elevate Your Rental's Backyard

Even though it’s become something of a social necessity because of the pandemic, there’s always been a certain appeal to outdoor entertaining. In fact, in our opinion, there’s nothing better than sitting outside with your friends under the stars on a warm July night. 

But because Covid has made outdoor entertaining such a central part of our lives, it’s become that much more important that our backyards are comfortable and accommodating. It’s no longer enough that your rental property has some green space — now you have to have a green space that’s actually welcoming. 

When you’re self-managing your own property, there’s always this balancing act between providing the best service and accommodations without putting too big a dent in your bottom line. You might want to make your backdoor space nicer to attract the best possible residents, but you can’t shell out a small fortune on the upgrades. That’s why hacks like the ones we’ll explore in this article are so wonderful: they allow you to make significant improvements without costing a significant amount.

Because there are so many different types of gardens and outdoor spaces, we’ve categorized these hacks by what kind of space they’ll work in: we’ll start with hacks for smaller gardens, and move on to ones for bigger spaces.

The best way to encourage outdoor entertaining is to make it as easy as possible to do (call it the “If you build it, they will come” theory of home improvements).  This beautiful fold-down serving station makes it easy to fix and pour drinks without having to enter into the house; not only that, but once it’s folded out you can use the table top to set up boardgames and the like.  It can even be used as a makeshift desk; after all, the only thing better than working from home is working outdoors! 

It’s especially useful if you don’t have a lot of space, like a small urban garden. Or even a balcony!

We know we said these hacks were for elegant, English-style gardens, but this beautiful French bench would work wonders on either side of the Channel. 

This one also takes a little technical know-how, but the out-of-pocket costs are so minimal — and the aesthetic affect is so resplendent — we think it’s worth the effort.  All it takes is some wood, two identical side-chairs, and a little bit of elbow grease to create this elegant addition to any backyard.  In fact the end result is so beautiful your residents might end up moving it indoors and using it as an entryway bench!

This hack might not be as simple as some of the others, but worth the effort!

Another relatively simple hack to execute, this bird feeder isn’t only charming and quirky, but by bringing feathered friends onto your property, it’ll make the backyard feel that much more romantic and special.  Plus we love a hack that requires you drink a bottle of wine.  It combines two of our favorite past-times — Beaujolais and home improvement!

It's a great trick for staging a home – when the prospective tenants walk outside, and see the attention to detail, it will help seal the deal by making the house loveable.

An especially charming addition to the backyard of a larger, family-friendly home, a tree swing will lend the space a sense of welcoming homey-ness. The best part is that installation is relatively simple — and in case a tree swing isn’t your idea of fun, you can use a lot of the same tricks and techniques to set up a hammock instead.

An especially great hack if your outdoor area doesn’t have much space for flower beds, these easy (and cheap) straw-bale planters will lend any area an aura of rustic, rugged authenticity. They’re perfect for herb gardens, too. 

Though many of these hacks are hackable even for the clumsiest among us, when you work with Belong you have access to their professional vendor network of over 10,000 contractors, who can help you build the ones that take a bit more know-how (and maybe a power tool or two).  

Easier access to professional contractors is one of the many ways Belong is simplifying the rental experience and helping more homeowners reach their financial goals through real estate. Visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

With outdoor entertaining becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the question for landlords becomes, “How can I make my backyard as comfortable as possible?”

Find out everything you need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market your rental home and get your property loved

How to Market Your Rental Property and Find a Great Resident, Fast

With so many listing websites out there, it’s hard to know where to advertise your rental property, and how to make it stand out from the crowd. This guide will take you through the process, and give you the power to find a resident who will love your home as much as you do.

One of the questions we get asked the most at Belong is “What do I need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market my rental property?”

Back in the pre-digital era, it was as simple as posting a listing in your local classifieds!  But now it seems like you need to be an expert in several different fields to check all the right boxes.  You need to be a marketing expert, one who is fully conversant in all the terminology and idiom that the natives of the real-estate industry use; you need to be a photographer and videographer who can make even the most basic spaces seem grand and inviting; and also you need to be a realtor – hyper-organized, super friendly and accommodating, up-to-date with market trends and rent prices, and willing to re-arrange your schedule on the whim of your potential clients. 

Given all that, is it any wonder that the process of finding a resident for your rental property seems so daunting?  Nor should it be a surprise that there is an entire industry devoted to helping landlords find tenants and keep them happy?  Even landlords who decide to self-manage their properties often choose to rely on brokers on the front end of the journey, to market the availability and find a resident.

If this sounds like a lot of work …That’s because it is.

It’s also the reason why so many people are working with Belong, the modern alternative to old-school, out-of-touch property managers.  Belong takes all these responsibilities off your hands, finding residents who will love your home as much as you do, while we treat your home with love and care.

Belong does so much for our homeowners that to list it all would create such a ridiculously long and unwieldy sentence that our Grammarly account would have the digital equivalent of an epileptic seizure.  We will prepare your house for the market, take photographs and videos (including 3D tours and virtual walkthroughs), list it on every relevant platform, show it to interested renters, and then prepare the contracts and help them move in. 

Curious to learn more about Belong? Click here, or see if your home qualifies for our platform, here.

If you want to be a true DIY-er, though, and handle the entire process by yourself, soup to nuts, this guide on how to market your own rental property will help you become a listing genius. 

Step 1: Understand the marketing channels

By channels, we are talking about the online platforms that list and describe properties for rent. That’s the formal way to describe them. The informal way is “Real estate porn.”

 It’s such a thing that there’s even a Saturday Night Live skit about it. So there’s no reason to be embarrassed if you too spend hours every day browsing through listing websites, looking at colonial masterpieces or brilliant new constructions.  It’s alluring.  In fact, many of us at Belong suffer from the same affliction. 

The good news is that if you spend a lot of time checking out houses for rent, you are ahead of the game when it comes to listing your own rental property.  You know the relevant sites, the kinds of photographs you need to take, the look and feel of a video walkthrough of a property.

Either way – a heavy user of real estate website or otherwise – you will find the information we’ve organized herein to be invaluable. Because the first step on the journey to successfully renting out your property is truly familiarizing yourself with the platforms and services you will use to market it.

With over 135 million listings, Zillow is the biggest real estate platform in the country.  And that’s just counting listings on Zillow.com: they also own Trulia and Hotpads, two other prominent listing sites.  So if you’re looking to rent out your home,, the first place you’ll want to list the vacancy is on Zillow. 

The nice thing about Zillow is that you are able to easily cross-list your vacancy on Trulia and Hotpads, increasing the number of eyeballs your ad will find.  

 The other nice thing about Zillow is that you can list one home for free for a month – which is perfect for people who only own a single rental property.  After 30 days it costs $9.99 a month to list on Zillow – a bargain, in our opinion, considering the platform’s reach.  Zillow also allows users to boost their listing, which gives it a more prominent placement on search results pages.

It probably goes without saying that there’s a lot of overlap between Zillow’s listings and Trulia’s: after all, as we stated above, Zillow owns Trulia.

But that being said, there are certain features that make Trulia unique relative to Zillow.  For one, it provides maps that give users information about the neighborhoods surrounding the properties they’re considering: it tells them what crime rates are in the area, where people eat and shop, what schools their children would have access to, and what your commute would be like. 

It's important for landlords to understand the way Zillow and Trulia organize the data about a listing, because it will educate you about how to position your listing; we’ll get into this subject a little later in the article, but when you’re marketing a rental property, it’s critical to remember that you’re also marketing a neighborhood.  If looking at Trulia teaches you something new about the area where you own a rental property, then browsing the site will be very much worth your time.

Much like Trulia, Apartments.com not only provides information about the individual listings on their platform, but they also have data on the neighborhoods in which those listings are located.  That includes info on shops and restaurants and the like, but Aparments.com also assigns each neighborhood walkability and bikeability scores.  They also have info on noise pollution, too. 

The main point of differentiation for landlords considering listing a home on Apartments.com is that the site is exclusively focused on rentals.  Which means that the audience it attracts is the exact audience you’re looking for. 

Apartments.com is free to use, though much like Zillow, you can pay for better placement.

Realtor.com scrapes MLS listings in order to build its robust database of homes for rent and sale.  (MLS is a service available to realtors that collates their listings in one place so people can easily find and search all the available properties.) 

Beyond its reliance on MLS data, Realtor.com also allows individual property owners to list homes for rent (but not for sale).  Much like the MLS’s from which they source most of their listings, Realtor.com is more focused on homes for sale, rather than homes for rent, but given that it’s free and popular, it’s worth your time to list your home there.

Craigslist remains popular with renters, though of course it doesn’t have the features and functionality that make the Zillows of the world so useful.  But it’s free and widely used, and so it’s worth your time. 

Beyond these mega-sites there are smaller players like HotPads, Zumper, and PadMapper – we encourage you to investigate them all, but if you’re trying to cast the widest net possible, we recommend looking at platforms like Avail that automate the process of cross-listing your home across several platforms. 

Avail also allows you to manage each listing and lead from a single portal.  In terms of getting your listing out there, it’s really a terrific option.  The best part?  Most of the key functionality is available through the free version of the service.   

Remember: it’s not only important to familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each of these platforms; it’s also critical that you see the kind of language, images, videos, and other marketing material landlords and realtors are putting on these sites.  That way, you’ll be much better prepared to take the next step in the process of marketing your home!

The beauty of Belong is that we do all the work for you; we identify which platforms are most relevant to renters in your area, create and syndicate the ads, and pay to have them boosted if necessary.  Not only that, your home will be listed on Belong’s website – a service we only extend to homeowners on our platform. And once prospective residents start reaching out about seeing the property, we schedule and show the home for you.  So you don’t have to worry about anything except cashing the rent checks when they start coming in.

Step 2: Create great marketing collateral

Now that you’ve familiarized yourself with these platforms, it’s time to start advertising your rental. That means cleaning the home, taking photographs and videos, and writing copy for the ads themselves that makes your property feel unique and special in the marketplace. We’ll take you through the process step-by-step.

If your home is still occupied by your previous residents – which could be you! -  it might be impossible to declutter and clean, but if you’re officially between leases use the downtime to your advantage.  A clean room with bright white walls feels open to endless possibilities; it invites potential residents to imagine what it would be like to live there.  Not only that, but the combination of bright lights and a high-definition camera might make dust that much more visible in your photographs, which can make your home seem dirty. 

As is the case with the first piece of advice we offered here, it’s really a matter of showing your home in the best light.

Now that you’ve taken care of the inside of the house, it’s time to take care of the outside.  It might not be cost-feasible to give it a new coat of paint, but doing touch-up work on problem areas is a great idea, as is making sure that the driveway is devoid of weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt, cleaning the gutters, and washing the windows.  Also it doesn’t take a huge amount of money to do a little landscaping: some flower beds and boxes under the windows can are beautiful touches that can really make a home that much more appealing.  If there are residents still living at the home, ask them to remove any childrens’ toys that might be scattered on the front lawn, and also, if possible, to park their car on the street temporarily.  First impressions matter – in dating and house hunting alike.  So make sure your home is putting its best face forward.

Find out everything you need to know, do, and follow up on in order to successfully market your rental property to get your property leased (and loved)

If you're finding it impossible to find contractors to get your property ready to hit the rental market, you need this unique property management solution.

How To Get Your Home Rent Ready When Good Contractors Can't be Found

Landlords are as anxious to rent their homes as people are to live in them. But getting those homes ready for new potential residents is getting harder and harder, as quality contractors are impossible to find. 

Where have all the home renovation contractors gone?  

They’re working on bigger, more complex jobs, that’s where they are! 

Thanks to the boom in new houses being constructed — along with an unprecedented number of renovations — we’re in the middle of a major labor shortage. There are more than 300,000 jobs in need of good, reliable craftspeople right now.

That makes finding help for smaller projects very challenging, to say the least. If you’re looking to get your home ready for the rental market, and you don’t have access to vetted professionals, this puts you in a tricky spot. You want to get your home ready to attract the ideal resident, but every day your house sits empty with no one to love it means you’re missing out on income. In this case, the cliche is true: Time is money.

You might have an impulse to put the home on the market as is, but this could also be leaving money on the table. A house that looks rundown or is not up to the standards of the neighborhood won’t bring the income it otherwise could.

Belong has an alternative to hunting for contractors

So what’s the alternative? How do you find great help, when help is so hard to find? How do you get your home fixed up ready to bring in as much income as possible, as quickly as possible?

By putting your Belong concierge on the case. Belong homeowners get instant access to over 10,000 professional contractors across our extensive vendor network. They’ve been in the industry for years and are the best in the business — experienced handy people that know how to care for a home and make it lovable.  From bathroom remodels to adding a new backsplash to a perfect fresh coat of paint, point them at a problem in your rental home and they’ll take care of it!

Landlords should know at least the basics about what in your house is up to code – and what needs to be brought up to code - before renting out your home.

Under the Radar Building Code Violations Explained

Though you’re a landlord and not a building inspector, it’s critical you know the basics about what in your house is up to code – and what needs to be brought up to code before renting it out.   

When you’re a landlord managing your own rental property, you often find yourself in a position where you’re forced to put your trust and faith in a contractor or tradesperson, and end up being let down. Say, for example, there’s an issue with the wiring in the house: unless you moonlight as an electrician, you probably don’t know if the person doing the work on your home is doing it right, or their work was up to code. 

Or maybe you did some work yourself, or the previous owner didn’t bring the house up to code, and it was missed in the inspection.

That’s part of the reason why there are so many building code violations in California — a combination of shoddy work, and landlords who don’t know enough to identify the work as being subpar. In some cities, in fact, over 45% of homes have violations, large and small.

That’s why we’re writing this blog, to bring to your attention some of the most commonly overlooked building code violations.

It’s important to keep in mind that these laws are set on a local level and vary from city to city and county to county. That’s why we encourage you to check with your local housing authority, to see if the violations identified in this piece are relevant to your rental property.

This is often the most common code violation in any given city or state. Usually the law is that every sleeping area needs to have its own smoke detector; sometimes an additional detector must be installed outside the sleeping areas as well. The placement of the detectors is also often legislated: typically smoke detectors need to be on or near the ceiling, while carbon monoxide detectors sometimes have to be placed closer to the floor. 

As stated above, it’s absolutely critical to know the local laws when installing a smoke detector or a carbon monoxide detector.  But you also have to take special care to ensure that the detectors you have in place are fully functional. We recommend testing them yourself every year, at which point it probably isn’t the worst idea to preemptively replace the battery. But it’s also important to remind your tenants every now and then to check those batteries on their own.

Especially with the recent relaxation on ADU laws, many homeowners in California are looking to further leverage their property by adding extra rentable spaces. It’s critical to remember, though, that every bedroom must have an escape window. Many municipalities go so far as to define the minimum proportions of these windows, to ensure an average-sized adult can crawl through them. Again, we strenuously recommend you consult with local authorities, but 20 inches wide by 24 inches is a good rule of thumb. 

Often there are additional provisions to ensure that bedroom windows provide an adequate amount of natural light and ventilation; the standards vary, however, making it critical (not to sound like a broken record) to consult with local experts

This is especially important to keep in mind if you’re contemplating converting your basement into a bedroom: you might have to perform some excavations to ensure the windows are adequately sized.

If the bathrooms in your home all have windows, you can skip this section. If not, you should be aware that, in many cities and counties across the country, you need to add a venting system that can help remove moisture from the air. Not only will this help reduce the potential for mold growth, but it will ensure that wood cabinets don’t warp and that paint doesn’t start to peel prematurely. 

It’s not only critical that you have a vent — the vent must direct the moist air it collects out of the house altogether. Vents that lead into an attic space might be easier to install, but depending on where you live, that could constitute a code violation, too.  And no matter where you live, venting moist air into a dark room that has little to no circulation is a sure-fire way to give your house a mold problem.

If you’re adding a ceiling light or fan or some other feature that requires electrical wiring, the connection between it and the preexisting wiring needs to be housed in a properly installed junction box.

“I have a great idea,” you might be thinking. “Instead of wiring it properly, I’ll just use a huge extension cord to plug it into a wall outlet or something.”  Think again — that too often constitutes a code violation. 

While we’re talking about electricity issues, we should mention that, in many places, it’s required that all the circuits in your circuit breaker box are clearly labeled and that no breakers are missing. This is a code violation that is often overlooked.

If your home is on the older side, it’s critical to check if there’s any asbestos or lead paint still present on the premises. Often found in insulation materials, asbestos needs to be removed by a licensed and insured expert who can handle and dispose of it safely and properly — not only to ensure their health and the health of occupants, but to guarantee it doesn’t end up in a landfill or dumpster.

With regard to lead paint, we all know the issues related to children, but it is dangerous for people of all ages. If your house was built before 1978, the chances are, according to the government, it has lead paint. To be certain, we suggest you hire a certified lead paint inspector. If it turns out there is lead paint, you will have to determine if the house needs to be stripped, or if the lead paint can be just sealed.

For more information about what you need to know about air quality as a landlord, check out this blog post.

Managing code violations in a rental property

If you’re thinking about investing in a rental property, or if you’ve recently inherited a house, it’s important to keep violations like these in mind. Whether you are planning to rent the house or sell it, the needs are the same.

Whether you’re self-managing a rental home or having your home loved by Belong, we make maintenance and repairs one less thing to think about. With an extensive vendor network of over 10,000 professional contractors, maintenance service subscriptions, great long-term residents and a 24/7 concierge service to help, you can get peace of mind that your home is well loved. 

When staging a property for the rental market, here are some tips that will help you attract people (and applicants) who will love your home as much as you do.

Enter, Staged Home

There are many, many challenges that come with self-managing a property: the first for everyone who takes the plunge is staging your home. Here are some tips that will help you attract residents who will love it as much as you do.

“Self-managing.” It sounds like such a harmless word. But there are many complex challenges of self-managing a rental property, many of which you won’t ever be able to anticipate until you are deep in.

The first challenge that presents itself, though, is easy to see coming: finding tenants to love your home as much as you do. 

That’s why staging your home is such a critical part of the process.  A beautifully staged home signals to potential tenants that your home is worthy of love.  After all, if the people trying to convince you to move in don’t care enough to make the house presentable, it’s not going to attract people who will in turn care for the house with extra love and attention.

There’s truth behind the famous saying that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That’s why we’ve made this list of proven tips and techniques for self-managers who are staging their own homes.

A simple fix that any self-manager should undertake is making sure their home is as well-lit as possible. This applies to electric lighting, of course, making sure that none of the bulbs are flickering and that all of them are in working order. But it’s maybe even more important to make sure that there is as much natural light in the home as possible. Have the windows professionally cleaned, and make sure the curtains are pulled back as far as possible.  A well-lit home feels welcoming and accommodating and friendly: a dark home on the other hand feels foreboding and dingy.  Not only that, but a well-lit home is much easier to photograph.

Obvious, but you would be surprised how often it is ignored. 

Of course this applies to the floors, the kitchen, and the bathrooms, but also the less obvious places like closets – as well as the garage, attic, and basement.  We’re not saying you need to bring in Marie Kondo, but a messy environment actually creates mental stress, and makes the house less appealing

Also, remember the full sensory spectrum when cleaning up.  Just because it looks clean doesn’t mean it smells clean. Air it out, light a candle, bleach the toilet — just don’t let an objectionable odor be the difference between a lookie-loo and your next resident.

Last point here: clean also extends to the walls.  Take a look at your walls with fresh eyes, and ask yourself if they need a fresh coat of paint. It works wonders!

It’s important to make your home feel like a blank canvas onto which your next residents can project their own personalities and tastes. 

What a lot of people do is put some of their furniture in storage to remove clutter. It’s not uncommon to rent furniture for staging purposes, either. Make sure it is tasteful and universally appealing – call it the West Elm look. 

Think about the way a nice, urban hotel room’s decorated; the way it feels stylish, but not so stylish that you feel uncomfortable. 

Again, this seems obvious, but you would be amazed how often homes are shown that aren’t in fully-functioning condition. Windows and doors stick. Faucets leak. The garage door requires superhero strength to open. 

We suggest that you do a walk-through, putting yourself in the shoes of a potential renter.

House plants can have a powerful effect on your residents. This is especially true when you’re staging a house. A few houseplants can help make a home feel bright and alive, especially in combination with white walls and a flood of sunlight. If things are growing in the house, it communicates to potential residents that the house is capable of nurturing life.  It also signals that the homeowner is a caring individual, who is capable of nurturing life themselves.

Concentrate your plants in the entry areas where they create the powerful first impression we talked about earlier.

Curb appeal matters. There’s research that says it adds as much as 11% percent of value when you sell a house,  and the same thinking applies to renting.

Peeling paint sends a bad message; of course, it’s expensive to repaint a whole house, so if there is a need consider some “surgical painting” in areas that are the most visible. For example, a coat of high-gloss paint on the front door is a welcoming signal.

Make sure your lawn and outdoor spaces are well-maintained. If the seasons permit, create some dramatic container plantings at your front door and in the back terrace. Staging the outside of your house is as important as the inside.  

Remember when we were talking about first impressions before? The first time someone sees your home from the outside — that’s the first mental imprint they will have of your home.

If some of this seems daunting, well, that’s where we come in. Belong takes care of every step of the process when it comes to finding residents who will love your home. If your home needs some extra TLC, our extensive vendor network can help with anything from painting to carpentry to plumbing or even renovation.

Not only that, but once the house is ready to be shown, we take photographs and create 3D virtual tours of the property to show it off in all its new found glory. Then, when we find someone who loves it as much as you do, we draw up the lease and help them move in.  

Want to learn more about what Belong does for homeowners? Click here. 

If you’re managing your own rental property, these space-saving hacks do just that and are guaranteed to make your home more desirable on the rental market.

We Picked 8 of the Best Space-Saving Ideas From Pinterest

Everyone’s looking for a little extra storage space. If you’re managing your own property, these space-saving hacks do just that, and are guaranteed to make your home more desirable on the rental market.  

What does one of America’s famous films and an $87.65 billion industry have in common? 

They are all related to the stuff we accumulate in our lives.

Citizen Kane starts with a series of shots that show the extent of Charles Foster Kane’s estate; but even with 49,000 acres, Kane doesn’t have enough room. The final shot shows a warehouse crammed with everything he can’t display, the priceless paintings and statutes and historical relics – and of course, “Rosebud.”

The related industry, you have probably gleaned by now, is self-storage. It’s so enormous that more than 30,000 owners operate roughly 55,000 self-storage facilities nationwide,

It’s a symptom of the modern condition: we have more things than space. Hence all the questions you’ll get (if you’re self-managing a rental property) about closet space, crawl spaces, attic spaces, and the like. 

Obviously, it’s great if your home comes equipped with these kinds of auxiliary spaces. If they do, there’s a lot that can be done to those spaces to make them useful to your potential residents. If your house is storage-lite, though, there are clever hacks to make the most of the space you do have.

A lofted bed is a classic space-creating technique

But the question is how can you make the most out of that newly freed space — and how can you aestheticize it, so it’s not only useful but beautiful? The use of shoji in the example above is not only a visual delight, but creates a sense of aesthetic unity, matching the walls of the room, and also the blonde-colored floorboards. It looks organic, like the product of an architect’s vision, rather than a way of getting around the fact that you don’t have a walk-in closet. Also, the way the stairs leading up to the loft space also acts as a bedside table is kind of genius. 

You don’t need to be Harry Potter to make the most of the space underneath a stairwell. Not only did these people manage to fit a desk into that space (a perfect solution from all those newly office-less WFHomers out there), but they fully exploited all the available vertical space by adding those extra shelves. You can also turn that space into a built-in bookshelf.  Not only is it useful, but it’s more aesthetically pleasing than a plain white wall.  In fact there is so much potential for stairwell transformations that it’s arguably the best place to start when you’re trying to add some extra storage space to your rental property. 

 One place people always need more storage? The kitchen. Not only for food, but also for all the little cooking knick-knacks and doo-dads you buy thinking you’re going to use them a thousand times, but then only end up using once or twice (like 90% of the Dutch ovens in existence). 

This simple hack – adding vertical partitions to your kitchen cabinets – not only allows your residents to store more stuff and make full use of the available space, but it also makes their stuff more accessible. And like all of the best storage hacks, it’s so simple and elegant you’ll be asking yourself why you never thought of doing that before. (For more great kitchen storage tricks check out the Apartment Therapy piece this Pinterest post was sourced from.)

Another trick to help your residents store things vertically? Magazine holders: not only are they cheap, but they’re incredibly easy to install.  It’s actually a trick used often on boats – a great source of inspiration when it comes to space-saving storage hacks.

Ah, the ceiling — the last frontier for space savers. It’s a little more complicated to build storage devices into the ceiling, but it could make all the difference in the world. It’s especially useful in garages and attics, spaces you’re already using for storage, where aesthetics aren’t necessarily at a premium. But there are ways to add ceiling – or ceiling adjacent – storage to any room in a way that’s both highly functional and aesthetically pleasing. For example, at about the height where you’d find picture molding in a pre-war building you can place a row of shelves – perfect for your residents’ books and knickknacks. 

The bathroom presents a unique challenge to the storage hackers of the world; not only does it tend to be one of the smaller (if not the smallest) rooms in the house, but despite that distinction, it’s one of the rooms that requires the largest amount of stuff – from towels to toothpaste to toilet paper to hairdryers – to be fully functional. That’s why we love hacks like the one pictured above, in which baskets are cleverly attached to the wall in order to create extra storage space – in this case for towels.  Really though you can use this idea to store pretty much anything – extra rolls of toilet paper, pill cases, moisturizers, shampoo bottles, you name it!

Of course you can let your residents just throw a bunch of stuff they never use into the attic, but it doesn’t take much expertise or time to add some built-in shelving along the lines featured in the image above. It’s the ideal place for out of season clothes!

Most of these ideas you can do on your own. But if you need to add a lot more storage — and you have to hire a contractor for the work — it’s maybe time to think about joining Belong. Belong connects you instantly to a professional vendor network of over 10,000 contractors and will let you spread the costs of repairs and renovations over the term of your lease. 

How do I rent out a property as a landlord, but live far away? Do I need a property manager or can I manage myself? We answer FAQs on owning interstate rentals

Long-Distance Landlord: How To Manage a Rental Home From Afar

Whether you had to move for work or picked up a steal of a property in another city, it’s not uncommon to live far away from a home you rent out. Even more so in 2024. With many homeowners holding onto interest rates too good to give up, renting out a home is often a better option when opportunity knocks in another city. 

This is why we get asked so often, “How do I rent out a property when I live far away?” 

Particularly if you’re considering the DIY self-management route, there’s a lot to consider before taking on the challenge from another state. It’s not impossible, but here are six questions to consider first. 

6 questions to consider before self-managing a rental home out-of-state

1. How often can I travel to my rental home? 


When preparing your home for the rental market, you will need to get it move-in ready. You’ll need to arrange a deep clean, attend to repairs and have professional photographs and video taken for your online listing. These are not remote tasks. Someone will need to be at the home to let in contractors, cleaners, and a real estate photographer.

If you travel to your rental home, be sure to keep accurate records of everything from your trip. You may be eligible to claim some costs such as airfares, hire car and petrol, even hotel accommodation as a tax expense for managing your rental home. 

If travel is too far or just not a viable option, is there someone you trust close by that you could enlist for help? This is where having a property manager or modern alternative like Belong can make the process much smoother, taking care of all preparations and listings on your behalf. If you do hire someone to manage the process, you can claim these fees at tax time too. 

Discover Belong: The best alternative to Property Management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, and many more cities across California, Texas, Utah, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Washington State.     

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