How to Turn Your Home Into Rental Property

Video Transcript

"Let's say, you want to turn your house into a rental property. The first thing you need to do, is check with your insurance company whether or not, you can do that, and if you need to increase your insurance. The second thing is, you want to check with your town and make sure that your town is o.k. with that. If there is any particular code, rules. etc., that would prohibit you from doing that. Next, I would take that property and I would probably talk to a real estate broker to get an opinion on what that home should rent for. If you want to rent it yourself, we've talked about different ways you can do that. But if you want to enlist a real estate broker to do it for you. Then you know, probably interview two or three different brokers, select the one that you feel comfortable with. And get the property into the multiple listing system in your area so that it can be shown as a rental. Now the property needs to be brought up to code in all respects. And I've talked about this in some of the other segments here. But you need to make sure that property is to code. You need to make sure that it's set up correctly, in terms of the liability issues, you know. Is it, is that property going to cause you grief, if someone gets hurt there? So you want to be protected legally. As you go to rent that property, you want to be cautious that you don't rent to folks that are going to cause grief to your neighbors. For example, if you're in a nice quiet neighborhood and you rent to you know, four or five college kids and they're going to have loud parties there. That's obviously not going to go over well and it's going to come back to cause you, the landlord a lot of problems. So you want to look at a lot of different aspects of this rental situation. You want to be very cautious to who you rent to, to make sure they're not going to cause problems in your house and for your neighborhood."