What are the steps to get started renting to Section 8 tenants? I was wondering if anyone could run me through step by step with some tips? Right now I rent to mainly college kids and members of the militarty.
Also what are the benefits? Restrictions?
Renting to Section 8 tenants is very similar to renting to any other tenant. The big difference is that Section 8 pays part or all of the tenant’s rent directly to the landlord and requires that an initial (and then annual) inspections be made of the property.
You can go to your local metropolitan housing (HUD) office and pickup a landlord packet. That will explain all the details.
If you have a specific question, I will be happy to answer.
Good Luck,
Mike
I have some S8 tenants. You just get partial rent and S8 pays the rest. They vary in quality. Sometimes you get good tenants happy to keep their S8 status. Then you can get tenants who dont care and just abuse the system. My units get inspected twice a year by my property manager. If you have a problem with the tenant just call S8 they are usually pretty good.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to get inside these low end houses to start learning the market (before making any offers). There was one Open House last weekend but it was cancelled. Should I go to listing agents to take me to look at houses, or will it give me a bad reputation to go visit a bunch of houses I have no intention of making offers on? Call FSBOs and see if they’ll let me see the house? Any advice is appreciated.
Yes you should call the realtor and get in to see some. Plenty of people go look at a lot of homes and never make an offer. You may have to get pre-approved first. Maybe you can get a realtor friend to show them to you.
This past fall, my girlfriend put her house on the market, but a bit high priced, to test it out. She got like 50 people come through in the 5 months it was on, and no offers.
Thanks. I don’t want to waste people’s time, but there seems to be no other way. Would getting a buyer’s agent just to look at houses to get comps be premature?
I did a fair amount of due dilligence recently speaking with the housing authority Manager here and other than waiting up to 2 weeks to be initially inspected before signing a contract there was no real perceived problems.
You screen them just like normal and hold them to the same standards and procedures. I just did not want to wait 2 weeks to fill a vancancy !
They would not let me get inspected first… I had to have a Section 8 Person that already wanted to rent from me before initiaing any action. I perceive that as a negative.
I have a mobile home that I’m thinking of renting to Section 8. I don’t understand something, though. The waiting list in my city has been closed and there is a wait of years, so I figured it meant housing availability was in short supply, but I looked online at current available rentals and there was about two pages worth! How can there be such a wait with so many properties to rent?!
There is only so much money in the program. in some areas, the problem is a lack of rentals, but for many other areas, it is that there are plenty enough rentals but not enough funding to help everybody who potentially could be qualified.
A second aspect could also be the size of the city/size of the program. If you have 10,000 families in the program that is a lot of rentals that need to be available, well in the hundreds, just to handle the normal movement.
The good news is that if you are a landlord you are not stuck doing only Sec8 - you are only authorized to take Sec8 tenants. You still have the option to rent to a nonSec8 tenant.