LeakBird

Many landlords and property managers, such as Jeff Porter at USA Landlord, establish excellent “water conservation programs” for their tenants, involving a number of elements:

• Tenant Education
• Tenant Motivation
• Installation of Water Conservation Devices

While it’s essential to have a conservation program for your buildings, being proactive with tenants who don’t foot their own water bills can take a great deal of time and involve a lot of one-on-one and meet-and-greet, sometimes without any payback.

Admittedly, in business payback is key, as property managers, while liking to be busy as it gives meaning to what they do, like to have control over their priorities and know that what they’re investing their time in will do one of four things:

• Make Their Jobs more Efficient
• Increase Their Cash Flows
• Save Them Time
• Save Them a Precious Resource, Such as Electricity, Water or Cash
  

Investing time in educating your tenants about their water usage and efficiency is important, but it’s always better to create a system as opposed to an ad hoc, wait-and-see, come-as-you-will, one-off approach, which can be exhausting and unrewarding.

For example, spending an hour with each of twenty tenants is almost three days worth of work.  A landlord or property manager needs to know that this twenty hours will pay them back a certain amount of, in this case, water savings over a certain amount of time.  It has to be worth it, that is, the ROI has to be there, or it’s simply a time drain.

Unfortunately, there are only three ways to create an effective system for your tenants, and this applies to any system, whether it’s to save water or to get them to pay their rent on time:

1. Motivate Them with Money
2. Remove Them from the Picture
3. Annoy Them to Respond with Action

When it comes to a running toilet, which 90% of the time is the cause of a high water bill, we’ve found that it’s impossible to remove the tenant from the picture.  It’s also impossible to motivate them with money when they don’t foot the bill.  Hence, the only way to get them to respond to the running toilet condition is to annoy them with an alarm, like that of a smoke detector to fire.

If you are interested in How You Can Increase Your Cash Flows by $2,500.00 Every Year and Never Pay for High Water Bills Due to Your Tenants’ Running Toilets, sign up for our Free Report here.

Abendigo Reebs is the VP of Business Development for LeakBird Industries LLC in San Francisco, CA. He may be reached by email at ben@leakbird

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