At some point in time, you may decide that you no longer want to own rental property but you are not sure where to begin. Selling a house with tenants is a little different than selling your home for a number of reasons mostly dealing with “control”.
The good news is that you have options. You could sell your home (with the tenant in it) to a cash buyer, another landlord or wait until the lease is over to sell.
Let’s dive into the details of selling your rental house so you no longer have to deal with pesky tenants.
Selling a house with tenants | The challenges
The main issue with selling your rental property is that you have very little over showing the home. From the moment you advise the tenant of your intent to sell, you may most likely be greeted with some hostility. Upon hearing the news, your tenants will be immediately concerned about their future. They typically don’t want to move, and will become worried about whether they will be allowed to stay or if their rent will increase. Their concerns will directly affect your ability to sell your house.
Showing the home to buyers
In most cases, you are required to give your tenant some advance notice that you would like to enter the property. However, as soon as you go down that road to schedule a visit with a potential buyer, you can run into the following problems:
- The tenant is suddenly unavailable, or
- You get there and the tenant is a no-show (house is locked up), or
- The house happens to be a complete mess when you do visit, sending your buyer running away.
Getting inspections done
If you plan on selling your house with tenants living in it, your buyers will almost always want professional inspections done. You will encounter the same scheduling issues for the inspection as you did with trying to show the home. In addition, your tenant will make sure they tell the inspector of every problem with the house (real or imaginary), and you end up with a bad inspection report which causes your buyer to ask for a price reduction or worse, they cancel the sale entirely.
Selling a home with renters | Solutions
You have two (2) solutions to selling property with tenants to minimize your stress:
- Sell to an experienced cash buyer like House Solutions USA or
- Wait until the lease comes to an end.
Selling your rental to House Solutions USA
We buy houses cash whether they have tenants or not. Since we hold a number of rental property ourselves, we are quite used to dealing with tenants, and in many cases we just take over the lease and the tenants don’t have to move. As a result, the transaction goes quite smoothly.
If you want an easy experience of selling a house with tenants, go ahead and fill out our fair cash offer form. We will give you an offer to buy your rental property with the tenants in it. You won’t have to wait until the lease has ended or deal with your tenants anymore.
Wait until the lease has ended
Your second option is to wait until the lease has ended and the tenants move out. At this point, you would just sell the home with or without a realtor, as you would your own home. You would clean up the house and the yard, and then do all the repairs necessary to get the house ready for sale.
There is one important difference though between selling your rental and selling your own home; for your rental property, you will have to drive to the rental every time you go to clean/fix it or meet a contractor to get repairs done. It sounds simple but depending on how far the rental house is from your home, it can turn out to be a huge inconvenience and stress. You may also be worried about the property being vacant, which is never a good situation.
Can I just terminate the lease and sell the rental immediately?
We get this question a lot when people don’t want to wait for the lease to end to sell a rental property. The answer to that question depends completely on the terms of your lease as well as the laws in your state.
A lease is a contract between you and your tenants, and every action you are allowed to take with regard to termination is guided by that contract. Unless your contract has some terms that allow you to terminate the agreement at your discretion (practically impossible), OR the tenants have violated the lease which results in termination, you will have to wait until the lease is over if you want the tenants to vacate the property prior to sale.
Even if the tenants violate the lease which results in termination of the agreement, you are still required to follow the relevant laws in your own city, county and state. In some instances, you can pay the tenant a sum of money in exchange for vacating the property early. This is commonly called “cash for keys“. This may or may not work for the tenant, and again is guided by the laws in your state. When in doubt about lease termination, consult an attorney.
You can skip all of the stress and sell to House Solutions USA. We will buy your house with the tenant and honor the current lease, so you don’t have worry about lease terminations at all. Just fill out the cash offer form and let us take on the property management stress.
For homeowners and Landlords, selling a house with tenants can be either relatively easy or a highly emotional experience; it really depends on the tenants and your lease terms. If you have any questions about selling rental property, feel free to contact us on this website or give us a call at 407-738-1581. We buy houses full-time and are landlords too, so we more than likely have the answers you are searching for.
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