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Cost Saving Ideals and Ways to Make Apartment Turnover Cheaper and Easier

By Michel Lautensack

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Paint Color

Do you like to paint everything in one color? We typically recommend an antique white or a very light beige on the walls and flat and white on the trim. But by the same token, if you buy a property and it's got another color in it, maybe you don't love the color but if it's a rental you might want to just stay with the color because it can be very costly to paint a new color.

If you go from maybe a light green or something to tan, it means two, if not three, coats of paint to really get it to look right, where if you just stay with the color that it currently is, you typically might get away with a one-coat paint. Again, there's a cost savings that you can kind of incorporate.

You have to use some judgment. If it's an ugly color you've got to paint it, but if it's not an ugly color, it's okay, it's reasonable, you might want to just stay with that color, do a one coat job where it's clean and fresh as opposed to changing the color where you may have to literally do a three-coat paint job, and obviously each coat is more money.

Apartment Amenities

I wanted to know if there were some things that, in your area, tenants have come to expect that an apartment should have? For instance ceiling fans, or do you, as normal course, when you're fixing up an apartment, look to include a certain set of things that you know that are going to make tenants want to rent your apartments over someone else's like ceiling fans?

Well, much of that is economic-based. Obviously higher end units are going to have to have air conditioning. If you get over say a $1,500 price point, it is almost inconceivable that you could rent it without air conditioning. You could throw in a couple of air conditioning window units, but someway of managing that process, particularly in the northeast.

I'm in the northeast. It can get awfully hot in the summer. In certain areas of the country certainly you've got to have it. That is one of the elements that we see.

Washer/dryers inside the house or apartment is a big feature that a lot of people like. We hate recommending it. Believe me, I hate it because when it breaks you've got to fix it. So at the lower economic dollars points such as $1,000 or below we do not recommend putting a washer/dryer in there, even though it would help the rent a little bit. The concern is every time it breaks you've got to fix it. In higher economic properties, it's almost essential.

Again, depends on things, like student housing. In student housing you're going to have to have it because students are not going to do anything else. They're going to want a washer/dryer.

Extra Bathroom Again, it all depends on the situation and kind of what your objective is. A lot of things people put in they think it's going to return a lot of value and it doesn't. Extra bathrooms - if you're doing a rehab and you can put an extra bathroom in a place, if you can go from one bathroom to one and a half or from one and a half to two or whatever, that can add a tremendous amount of value.

A lot of older properties, particularly here in the northeast, have these old houses where they only had one bathroom. If you can add an extra half or full bathroom, you can really enhance the value and it will rent much easier and much quicker.

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