Check Downspouts Gutter when You Buy a New Rental House

Check Downspouts & Gutter When You Buy A New Rental House

When you buy a new house that you intend to rent out, be certain to check the downspouts. These get overlooked too frequently and can cost landlords substantially. Attention to these should be part of your typical maintenance. See, for every inch of rain we get, our rooves divert around 600 gallons of water into our downspouts. You must make sure that this water diversion is working the way it should. Know this ahead of time, because renters often don’t bother to report on these like this, especially if it doesn’t affect them.

Check Gutters For Clogs

Clogged gutters throw a wrench in the whole system. Be sure to check your gutters regularly for your rental homes. You can also just include it on the list of jobs for your maintenance people, but make sure they don’t neglect this job. Clogged gutters can lead to damaged fascia, damaged ceilings and even damaged roofing. Eventually, when they fail, it can lead to leaks and flooding in the home too.

Check Downspout Length

It’s completely possible that a home you purchase for an investment will not come with adequately long downspouts. You will want to make sure that through the use one of the many downspout extender options, you divert the water 8 to 10 feet away from the foundation of your home.

Downspout Extender Styles

There are a variety of downspout extenders you can choose from to suit your needs. If you are preparing a rental home for tenants, an underground system is probably preferable. These are more durable and less at risk for random tenant negligence or unreported damage. You could always just use another downspout and an angle to divert the water, but if a heavy wind pulls this downspout away, your tenants might never let you know until it’s already done damage and leaked water into your house. Systems that require rerolling the extender after each rain is a bad idea unless you have a maintenance crew on your payroll.

So, the preferred way is probably going to be something like the UnderGround Downspout Extension Kit. This kit utilizes a debris filtering system at the end of your typical downspout to make sure the whole system stays free of leaves and other junk that can clog up the system. Then, it uses a PVC pipe that goes down into the ground, bends and extends out away your rental home’s foundation. At the end of the system, there is a bubbler pot.  The bubbler pot disburses the water where it’s at. That prevents the water from building up around the home’s foundation. If you have successfully dug trenches or french drains and know how to glue PVC pipe together, you can handle this project alone. Of course, you’ll still need to make sure to check in with the utility companies to make sure that you don’t accidentally damage underground wires or existing underground pipes.

[Image via Flickr | CC 2.0]

Are You Looking for a Hard Money Loan to Flip a House Or Buy A Rental Property?

Paces Funding is a hard money lender offering hard money loans to purchase and renovate non-owner occupied residential and commercial properties throughout the Atlanta, Nashville, Florida, or the North and South Carolina metropolitan areas. Our application process for hard money loans is easy. Just fill out this very simple online form and you will be contacted shortly. Unlike other lenders, the window between applying and funding is very small. We have funded properties in as a little as one day, but typically funding hard money loans takes about seven to ten days.

Call us at 404-814-1644 or contact us online to find out whether you might qualify for this type of funding. In the meantime, check to ensure that you meet our loan criteria. Our loan amounts can be up to 65 percent of the after-repaired value of the collateral—and if you use the loan for renovation or construction, the loan amount can be based on the collateral’s improved value.