As a landlord, you want your tenants to be safe. You know that this is generally your responsibility. You also want the building to be safe because the property itself is an asset. A fire, for instance, doesn’t just put your tenants at risk. It also damages or destroys an asset and removes your income from said asset.
But what if you do all that you can to make it safe and the tenants take it upon themselves to make unsafe changes? Say they opt to take down smoke alarms that you installed because those smoke alarms were always going off when they were cooking. Or imagine that they decided to replace the outlets with upgraded models, including USB chargers, but they did it themselves and created a potential fire hazard with faulty wiring. Now, what should you do?
What does the contract say?
It may be wise to have in your lease that tenants should never alter the physical space in these ways and that they should always contact you to do repairs or make upgrades. It doesn’t mean that they can’t desire to make changes to the apartment, but just that those changes should go through you as the landlord. This ensures that you can hire a qualified individual to do the work and that you can rest assured that everything is up to code.
Naturally, though, your tenants may feel that this is unfair to them, as they want to make changes quickly or to their own specifications. If this leads to dangerous conditions and disputes between you and the tenants, you need to know what options you have.
