Skip to Content

5 Preventative Maintenance Tips Every Tampa Landlord Should Know

5 Preventative Maintenance Tips Every Tampa Landlord Should Know

Preventative maintenance is an important part of protecting the condition of your Tampa rental home, and ensuring it remains habitable. While many landlords are focused on routine and emergency repairs, it’s easy to forget about the things that you need to have serviced and inspected on a regular basis. Deferred maintenance is always more expensive than preventative maintenance.

Today, we’re sharing five tips that will help you meet and manage your preventative maintenance needs.

Tip 1: You Need Great Vendors

You can’t have a good preventative maintenance plan without a great team of vendors. Put together a list of preferred vendors and contractors who know you and your investment property. If there’s an emergency in the middle of the night, you don’t want to be looking for a plumber. You want to have someone reliable and responsive who will answer your call.

Develop relationships with professionals before you need them, and listen to their advice and recommendations when it comes to caring for your property. Make sure all of the vendors you work with are licensed and insured to prevent risk and liability.

Tip 2: Pay Attention to Plumbing

Water damage is expensive and difficult to repair. Small leaks are easy to ignore, but they almost always turn into larger leaks that damage floors and walls and eventually lead to rot and mold. Be proactive about preventing them. Anytime you are in the property, take a look at the areas under sinks. Check the floors around toilets and tubs to be sure there isn’t any softening. Look for drooping or discolored ceilings and walls.

Tip 3: Service your HVAC System

One of the most expensive systems in your rental property is the heating and cooling system. In Tampa, our air conditioning works overtime. There’s humidity and heat almost all year long, which means those systems need to be in great shape. Have your HVAC system inspected and serviced annually. This will ensure it’s working properly, and it will also extend the life of your heating and cooling system. The tenants will appreciate this because it will improve their air quality and keep their energy costs down.

Tip 4: Prepare for Hurricane Season

In Tampa, residents are fortunate not to have to worry about shoveling snow or scraping ice off cars. However, we do have hurricanes and tropical storms, and there’s a fear every year that some catastrophic storm will sweep through the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last few years, there have been some major hurricanes and devastating storms to hit Florida, and that’s made us more attentive than ever to preventative hurricane maintenance.

Make sure your rental property is prepared. Your tenants need to understand all the security precautions and your home needs to be protected against the potential for high winds and flash floods. You might want to consider investing in hurricane shutters and high impact windows.

Tip 5: Work with Professional Tampa Property Managers

Tip 5: Work with Professional Tampa Property Managers Preventative maintenance is a major benefit to your rental property, but it takes a lot of time and coordination. You need to pay attention to schedules, work with vendors, and talk to tenants about how to care for the property. A Tampa property management company should already have these procedures and plans in place. When you have a property manager taking care of preventative maintenance for you, there’s less for you to worry about.

We’d be happy to help. Contact us at Real Property Management Instant Equity.

We are pledged to the letter and spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of equal housing opportunity throughout the Nation. See Equal Housing Opportunity Statement for more information.

The Neighborly Done Right Promise

The Neighborly Done Right Promise ® delivered by Real Property Management, a proud Neighborly company

When it comes to finding the right property manager for your investment property, you want to know that they stand behind their work and get the job done right – the first time. At Real Property Management we have the expertise, technology, and systems to manage your property the right way. We work hard to optimize your return on investment while preserving your asset and giving you peace of mind. Our highly trained and skilled team works hard so you can be sure your property's management will be Done Right.

Canada excluded. Services performed by independently owned and operated franchises.

See Full Details