Section 8 HUD Inspection Checklist

Guidebook

Full Video Transcript

Hey everybody. Pat Wilver, Trophy Point Realty Group here. I’m at one of my rental properties that I own, and we are preparing to onboard a section 8 tenant, basically a housing choice voucher program tenant. A lot of landlords really scared of section 8. I found people either love them or hate them. The, the one thing about it is, is you wanna get ahead of these inspections. They’ll do ’em before a tenant moving and they’ll do ’em once a year. And when they come out to inspect, if you don’t do well, they’re never in a hurry to come out and reinspect. So that’s why I’m out here. Today’s Tuesday, Friday’s the inspection. And so I already went through and identified some things that I’m gonna have my Miami man come in and church up before the inspector comes on Friday, but this is something if you’re getting into section 8 you can get one of these from HUDs website.

We can we’ll throw this up on YouTube. So I’ll make sure to put a link to this in the comments (see above), but it’s definitely good to get ahead of this stuff. And as long as you do the maintenance, like you’re supposed to, you know, in, any landlord, any rental property, you should be doing maintenance. You should be doing at least a yearly inspection if your tenants are sticking around. So this stuff is not a big deal. As long as you stay on top of it, nothing, in my opinion, to really be scared of. I have found in section 8, sometimes it’s a pain to communicate with the, the local housing office basically. So I haven’t had too much issues, but sometimes I had to double tap and we go to somebody’s boss or whatever. But it’s a just, you know, we’re going line by line and it’s really, you know, the place doesn’t need to be perfect.

You know, there’s some little bit of paint or whatever, like they’re not looking for that, but they’re looking for serviceability. So, you know, I got my little outlet tester here, so we are, you know, going through testing outlets. And they even, you know, on top of the checklist, they even give you an explanation of what they’re looking for. So, you know, what are we looking for here? Electricity, um you know, we’re looking for basically two, two outlets, right? Both outlets must be working. They’re also looking for light fixtures, things like that. So also the, the bulbs now it says right here, be sure light fixture does not fail just because the bulb is burnt out. Just put new bulbs in. It’s just, it’s just make sure there’s, there’s fresh bulbs is what we’re basically looking for. So it doesn’t say anything here about the outlets, you know, being grounded, right?

These outlets are actually not grounded. You can see I don’t know if you can see that, but they are actually not grounded. That’s not a big deal. A lot of people, when they do, you know, they’re buying a house, especially if they’re buying old houses, you know, around Savannah or anywhere, with those old houses, a lot of these outlets will not be grounded. Cause that’s not what they did. And people see the report and they’re like, “oh my God, they’re not grounded, it’s the end of the world!” It’s really not – look at your TV, how many prongs? It’s probably 2 most of your appliances are probably 2-prong now and you can you know, by the code, totally legal, um totally legit, you just put everything on a GFI breaker if you don’t have it grounded. And it’s, it’s fine. So ask any inspector about that, they’ll tell you the same thing. So yeah, so we’re checking all the outlets, so I won’t go through it, but I’ve already checked all the outlets all throughout the house.

We’re looking for windows that lock. So these windows here, they have locks. That’s a security thing. We’re making sure the windows are serviceable. This window here does not have lock. I’m gonna call my Handman and say, Hey, put a lock on this guy. There’s a couple other windows that don’t have em. We’re also making sure that windows open especially in bedrooms, it’s like a, a fire thing, right. So need to be able to get out on this living room, doesn’t say anything about smoke detectors, right? It does on the bedrooms when we go over there. But yeah, they’re just, they’re just looking, you know, is the floor sound and free from hazardous defects? You know, it’s pretty sound to me, pretty solid, nothing hazardous on go over to the kitchen, looking for a lot of the same stuff.

Now the, the electricity here this outlet does not need to be, but this outlet should be a GFI outlet and probably this one as well. And they’re actually not. So I tested ’em, you know, just put a little tester in, clicked the button. It should pop off. If it doesn’t, so that’s a, that’s a super easy fix. Costs me like $30 to get a GFI going on in there. And that’s something I’d want do for any tenant, just because it is a hazard. Even if you don’t care about your tenants at all, you should care about your own liability, at least. So you should also probably care about your tenants. But you know, um so yeah, the same. So, you know, we’re testing hot, cold water, you know, boom, right. We’re good. Even though you don’t need to have a sprayer, but it’s there, so we wanna make sure it works.

I’m looking for some leaks, it looks good down here. Everything’s dry. And now my hot water is actually not, not really rocking and rolling right now, but I think it’s cause they’re was a breaker that was off. So I’m going to let that heat up for about a half an hour and check again. We’re checking stoves right now. I gotta work order on this stove. Should get fixed tomorrow. Um you know, in regards to the stove, there’s the top, are the top burners present and working you know, if you’re not there that’s a fail. If the tenant is responsible for the appliances, then obviously that’s, that’s not on the owner. Right. But typically you know, owners are, are responsible for that. They’re gonna check whether it works. There’s no micro, there is a microwave. So, you know, actually this wasn’t even on the inspection. So I think the microwave doesn’t matter. Let’s see no, no microwave on here. So, but it’s here. I wanna make sure it works because you know, my tenants lease this with the expectation of having a working microwave. So you,

Well, the lights on, there we go. All right, we’re good refrigerator, right? That’s a requirement. So we gotta make sure it’s cold. I’m not gonna put a thermometer there, but feels totally adequate. This is just basic stuff, right? Nobody’s gonna rent house without a refrigerator, unless that’s expressly part of the lease that they were to bring their own. Same thing as every other room we’re checking ceiling walls, you know, we got just because there’s this little patch job, they didn’t do a very good job. I got L cheap O contractor on this, but like that’s, that’s not gonna fail your inspection, right. Just cause it doesn’t look the most pretty that’s, you know, not a big deal. So that’s, that. That’s most of that in the kitchen. Also we need space to, for storage preparation, serving the food.

I would say we have plenty of that looking around plenty of places to prepare food, to serve it, to store it. No issues that I see. So we’re going to bathrooms. I mean, this is all like super simple stuff. Like, you know, in this bathroom we got, you know, does the sink work, does the toilet work is there hot water, does the bathtub work you don’t technically need a shower tub or shower working tub or shower. So either – or. You know, does, does the vent fan, we got a light, you gotta have a permanently attached light. You don’t need to have a vent fan, but if there’s no vent fan, then there needs to be a window. And by the way, we’re checking, here’s a lock, right? So everywhere where there’s a window, it needs to be able to lock. And then this outlet up here, I got my handyman coming out.

There should be an outlet cover on that. And that’s a safety hazard and it’s also not a GFI outlet. So we’re gonna get ’em to fix both of those issues. And then while we’re here, you know, we got no leakage going on, everything looks pretty dry in there. So too easy. Uh you know, bedrooms we’re looking for smoke detectors at least one battery operated or hard-wired smoke detector. So it doesn’t need to be hardwired. I don’t have smoke detectors in here. That’s one of the things that we’re gonna get in every bedroom. And we’ll put a smoke and a carbon monoxide in the kitchen as well. I don’t think I remember seeing that on the kitchen checklist, which a little surprised they didn’t, cause I figured it would have to be on there, but it’s not on the checklist for the kitchen.

So I guess that means I technically don’t need them. The, so all these bedrooms are all the same. Pretty basic stuff. Really not a big deal I’ve got on here. I got a couple other window locks from the lock I did before, so yeah, that’s no big deal. Other things we’re looking for is you know, general electrical hazards. So like if you don’t have a cover on your panel, that’s an electrical hazard, right? So this one has a cover, it’s labeled, this is perfectly fine. You know, in here you know, we, everything is, is wired the way it should be. There’s no loose wiring hanging out. I’ve got a, I’ll probably put a, a cover plate on that guy right there, because that can be construed as a electrical hazard. See that. So I’ll get that, you know, churched up you know, there’s no requirement for having a washer or dryer in the unit. This one does. So yeah, I mean it’s, it’s not too bad. Now going outside. Some things that we’ll we’ll look for is the…

So heating and plumbing is another thing. So adequacy heating – are HVACs good. So no worries there um. Water heater – so we’re looking at this thing here: location presents hazard means that the gas or oil water heater is located in living areas or closets or safety hazards may exist. So this is a basically a separate utility room. If this was in somebody’s bedroom, you know, that would be an issue. This is electric, so we don’t have to worry about venting and things like that. We have no leaks, corrosions, we got a sewer connection. This isn’t on a, on a well. I don’t know much about wells, so if you’re dealing with a well, you know, there’s perc test and other, I just, I do Savannah. I don’t do wells. So ask somebody who does, ask them about that. We want to inspect the foundation, you know, make sure it’s not crumbling. We wanna have all of our covers for our crawl space, [unintelligible]

You know, they’re also for chipping paint, especially an old house that, that relates to lead based paint. Lead based paint is really not a hazard unless it’s chipping off. I have no idea whether this house has lead-based paint or not. It was built before 1978. So theoretically it may what we’re look for is paint chipping off. Everything’s been painted. I’m not huge on the color. This, this color did not come out they way I envision, but it is what it is. I’m not gonna put new paint on it now maybe in a couple years. And so, so yeah, that’s the, you know, that’s the main, main thing of it here. So we’re gonna get all this stuff done. Come Friday when they come to do the inspection, we should be, you know, a hundred percent good to go on this rental.

So this deal itself was a really good deal for us. You know, we didn’t always intend on this being a section 8. We actually just, we had a tenant from another place that we sold, who we really liked, and they needed a place to stay. We basically cut a deal. So you know pending all the approvals and stuff, they should be moving in here. Which is great, but we bought this well it’s been 2 months now. So about 3 months since we bought it we put about $10-12,000 into it. It was mostly done. We basically framed this out. This was an open space. So we enclosed this to get a third bedroom. We did some lighting stuff like there used to be it was like ceiling fan here and this, this ceiling’s low. So we decided to do can lights. Here we did countertop.

These cabinets were here. This is not the style cabinet that I would choose. But these are already here and they’re actually really high quality cabinets. They were improperly installed, so we spent some money installing them a little better. Countertops. we were, we were gonna do granite. I like granite or stone in a rental, believe it or not. Just because to the longevity you know, it’s more expensive, but it, it lasts longer. It really presents a much better product, but my contractor really kind of screwed me. My first one ended up firing him. He never ordered it. So we said, screw it. Laminate is what we went with it. And it’s fine. These appliances, we scavenged from another project that I was working on for our client. He didn’t need them. And so we said, “Hey, how about we take them out for you?”

So we got some free appliances. We’re gonna have to put a little bit of money into this, cause it doesn’t work. But but yeah, we bought this thing for $115,000 you know, $10k, you know, might be as much as $15k by the time we’re all done on the repairs that we did, which weren’t, you know, super major. So we’re all in for $130k. We’ve got a loan, we got a loan from a private individual who lent to us the entire purchase price, $115,000. We covered closing costs, which were like, yeah, $2,500. And our mortgage payment is with taxes and insurance is around about $800. And we’re getting, we should be getting $1400 rent off of this, so good little cash deal. We don’t have too much money tied up in it, which is great. And this is a neighborhood like this particular block all around here there’s like, you know, a couple you know, drug houses around, you know, like they’re actually just over there. And, and this is a weird part of Savannah where like, if you go just over there, just the block you know, we’ve got another rental over there that’s like, you know, about the same size of the, this, and it’s running for $1800 now. It’s a lot, it’s a lot nicer, but like, it’s just, it’s just right over there. It’s just so much nicer right over there. Just 2 blocks over that way. You know, you’re in east broad, you’re basically in Starland, this is just like the one little pocket and it’s just a couple people, like most of the neighbors are great, you know, talk to whatever. It’s just the impact at a couple houses can have on our neighborhood. What we do, you know, those people aren’t gonna be there forever. Eventually somebody’s gonna buy that house from probably some slum lord running it not taking care of their investment, you know, not caring about the community. So eventually that gets bought, that gets fixed up and you know, this is a long haul kind of investment for us. So we’re, we’re pretty excited about this deal that we were able to strike.
[/av_textblock]