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HOW TO DIFFUSE A DIFFICULT TO HANDLE TENANT
By Frank Rolfe
There
is no shortage of difficult to handle tenants inside of a mobile
home park. In fact, the challenge is to find nice, rational ones.
Until that changes, it is important to know how to diffuse the
difficult tenant to minimize stress and disruption to your business.
Over time, using the following strategies, you can often “wear out”
these tenants and, although they seldom become happy, they will at
least leave you alone and put their focus on bothering other people.
The first thing you have to do is get into the
mindset of the difficult customer. Often, they fall into two groups
1) bullies, no different than those you would encounter in school
and 2) needy, lonely people who create problems to get personal
attention they crave. Either type of customer can drain your
enthusiasm and happiness, and cost you many times their lot rent in
happiness and peace of mind. The tricks I am about to describe will
diffuse both of these types of bad customers.
Slow It Down
One of the characteristics that always works
to a bad tenant’s favor is the ability to “rattle” you and make you
react to their complaints immediately. Your desire to immediately
convert their problems to solutions only fuels the fire – they feel
powerful and in command by making you scurry around like their
personal butler. The only way to deprive the tenant of this pleasure
is to slow the whole process down. If you currently answer your
phone on every call, consider letting them all go to voicemail,
except the numbers on caller I.D. that are important to you, such as
your lender. Once in voicemail, you can review them on your own
schedule and prioritize who to call back and when. The first step to
curing the bad tenants is to add one entire day to your current
response time. If you would call them back within five minutes of
their call, then starting immediately, you need to add 24 hours to
that – call them back in 24 hours and 5 minutes. It will absolutely
drive them nuts! If you have trained them to expect you to be their
lackey, they will freak out at your total lack of respect for their
power. Will slowing things down hurt your business? I doubt it. What
could they have to say that really matters that much anyway. Do you
know any company, other than 911, that gives immediate responses to
your problems? Your insurance company? Your mortgage company? Ha!
Distance Yourself
One great way to send the message to your bad
tenants that you are no longer putting up with their games is to
make yourself inaccessible. Stop answering your phone. And don’t
make yourself so accessible when you visit the park. By
putting some distance between yourself and your tenants, it sends a
clear message that you have a life outside the park, and your life
does not revolve around them. Never get in a rut of spending a lot
of time shooting the breeze with your tenants. If you need human
contact, join a club or something, but don’t hang around with
trailer park tenants. By not being their “buddy” it reduces your
interaction with them and makes it harder to bring problems to you,
or to “bond” with you.
Turn The Tables
Nothing takes the wind out of the sails of the
bad tenant more than letting them know that you don’t really care
what they think or if they even stay in the park. A great way to
respond to a nasty tenant’s complaint is to say “obviously you are
not happy here, so why don’t you move out”. This sudden twist puts
them on the defensive and creates a change of roles where you
are back on top as the landlord. It’s your property and you’ll do
whatever you want with it (within the law hopefully), including
shutting it down and evicting everybody. The tenants are only there
because you let them be there. It’s your business, not theirs.
Remember that the tenant has a cost of about $3,000 to move their
trailer – think of how much power over them that gives you.
Conclusion
Just like your computer gets rid of viruses by
banishing them into quarantine, it is important that you remove the
disruption and shock of bad tenants from your business and
lifestyle. By slowing things down, distancing yourself, and turning
the tables, you can turn even the worst actors into paying customers
that cause little real disruption.
All you ask from your tenants is that they pay
you the rent. Beyond that, their opinions and desires really don’t
have any place in running a business. Don’t make yourself the park
concierge – go back to being the landlord and save your sanity.
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