How Landlords Can Protect Rental Properties From Lawsuits,Bad Tenants, & Legal Mistakes|Tim Baldwin

Tim Baldwin (00:00)
think probably a big misconception that landlords have is they can sort of just run their business any way they want to and it doesn’t matter, so to speak. ⁓ For example, ⁓ landlords who ⁓ maybe just download a form from like Zillow or some generic place thinking that that doesn’t have a real significant impact on their business, but in fact it really does. So I see landlords sort of treat it.

more flippantly than they need to and not really look at themselves for what they are and that is they are a business that provides housing and nowadays there is a lot of scrutiny with the housing market. There’s a lot of scrutiny from government agencies, from tenant advocates, ⁓ from even media and so you have to take the business very seriously and take the right steps to ensure that you’re doing things properly, that you’re documenting

⁓ Every step along the way that if there’s ever an accusation made against you you can go back and look to see what happened What steps you took to properly? ⁓ Act or respond to a situation ⁓ So all of that

Michelle Kesil (02:38)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Tim Baldwin of PM Law Solutions, helping landlords and property managers understand the law enforcement strategies and yeah, better protect their businesses and assets. So excited to have you here today, Tim.

Tim Baldwin (03:06)
Thank you, Michelle. Good to be here.

Michelle Kesil (03:07)
Great, so let’s dive in. First off, for those not familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?

Tim Baldwin (03:14)
Yeah, so we are law firm in Florida. We represent property owners, landlords, property management companies, and apartments throughout the state of Florida. We have a strong emphasis on possession actions, so that could include evictions, unlawful attaener, removing people that shouldn’t be there. We handle other aspects of the property management business, such as risk mitigation, civil litigation,

If a tenant sues our clients, we represent them. If our clients need to sue a tenant or somebody else in that regard, we handle those cases as well. So we’re sort of a full scope operations for property owners and landlords.

Michelle Kesil (03:53)
Awesome and is this only in Florida or do you operate in other markets as well?

Tim Baldwin (03:58)
We are in Florida currently, are making plans on expanding elsewhere, but for now we’re just in Florida.

Michelle Kesil (04:03)
And what is the process when someone wants to work with you?

Tim Baldwin (04:08)
Typically they’ll reach out to us through our website or maybe a social media ⁓ page if they see me. They could email us, they could send us direct message or they could call our office, our submitted intake ⁓ form from our website. And once they do that, then our office reaches out to them and see how we can help them.

Michelle Kesil (04:25)
And in what ways do you help property managers and landlords protect their assets? Like what does the legal process look like?

Tim Baldwin (04:35)
Yeah, we serve as an advisory role for many ⁓ professional managers especially ⁓ to help them make sure that they have their operations sort of set up properly, if I’m going use that word broadly. So whether it’s looking at their lease agreement or providing them with our lease agreement and other forms that they use on a day-to-day basis, as well as to provide them with education and training material. So that’s sort of on the operations side.

And then of course if they have issues or problems that they face on the day to day, they contact our office so we can help navigate through those issues and problems so that they can make good decisions in a timely manner. And then of course if it comes to litigation, again we represent them in that litigation to try to resolve those to resolution.

Michelle Kesil (05:23)
And how can an operator best set up their business for legal success?

Tim Baldwin (06:18)
I think it starts with ⁓ the documents, the foundational documents that they’re going to use to form that relationship with the tenant. The lease agreement is so, I can’t really overstate the importance of the lease agreement because that is essentially the business document that the landlord is going to use to operate their business, to impose obligations on the tenant. Of course, within the confines of what the law requires. But one of the ways that, ⁓

Or one of the problems we see a lot of landlords take is they just have a generic template of documents that really aren’t designed to help them run a landlord business. So I would say that’s the first ⁓ primary step. Of course, there are other aspects that are really important, too. That is to have your process and procedures ⁓ in place of the entire process. So from advertising the property for rent all the way to the turnover of

the property to another tenant. So that entire process needs to have a protocol. It needs to have an operational system. So that’s another really important aspect, I think, and it can be quite complex and sort of maybe confusing for some people, but there are a lot of tools and resources nowadays that are available for operators, programs, even AI-generated or AI-prompted type programs that help you manage properties better.

And then I would say as well, that’s really important with this is to have a law firm available so that whenever you run into the snags or you run into the questions, you can get those questions answered quickly and be able to take the right steps necessary for the situation. Because if you don’t do that, then it can just lead to a lot bigger problems, could lead to litigation and liability. So having that as well.

Of course, you can start looking at how are going to structure this business? Are we going to be an LLC? Are we going to be a corporation? Insurance protections. Who should I have as my CPA or accountant? The bookkeeping aspect of it. There’s a lot that goes into it, of course. ⁓ So we try to point our clients in the right direction with any point of their operations.

Michelle Kesil (08:30)
Yeah, absolutely. And what operationally do most people miss or forget that you think puts them at risk?

Tim Baldwin (08:40)
I think it’s really ⁓ knowing the steps they need to take whenever there is a problem or a pushback from a tenant or a complaint from a tenant is how do you resolve that? ⁓ landlord-tenant law, especially in Florida, is very notice and procedural driven. So taking the proper steps of knowing how to respond to a tenant to determine what are the obligations of the tenant or what is our obligations as a landlord.

and knowing how to respond accordingly. So if it turns out that the tenant is in some way responsible or obligated to do something or not to do something, it’s putting in place the steps to ⁓ enforce that obligation. So like in Florida, there’s certain notices that have to be given. So you have to make sure you know when to give those notices and the content of that notice. And then if it’s your obligation, how do you treat that? know, if it’s something.

along the lines of a maintenance problem and it’s your obligation. It’s getting those, you know, getting maintenance assigned to the right person properly and timely, documenting thoroughly what it is you’ve done and bring that maintenance issue to completion. ⁓ So it’s really these understanding of obligations under the agreement and the law and processing those accordingly. I see a lot of landlords that sort of miss that and they…

don’t really know what to do and how to respond. I think ⁓ getting that in line properly is a critical part of landlording.

Michelle Kesil (10:13)
Yeah, absolutely. And what stage of the process do you most help clients with? Or where do you see like the biggest roadblocks?

Tim Baldwin (10:58)
We help property management companies and landlords from the beginning to the end. if it’s with, again, helping them with getting their library, so to speak, in place, getting their process and procedures ⁓ solidified so they know what they’re doing and how to do that, we do that all the time for our clients. And then, of course, again, sort of the day-to-day operations when they have questions or issues or ⁓ even just…

problem tenants that they don’t know what to do with and how to handle them. We help them in that situation there. And then of course, unfortunately, just in this business, you’re going to have times when you have to either follow the eviction or deal with a tenant who’s threatening to sue you, or you’re getting letters from an attorney demanding information from you as a landlord, ⁓ helping our clients to respond to those. do you process those properly?

We do that as well. it’s really beginning to end is how we help clients.

Michelle Kesil (11:56)
Yeah, amazing. And what type of protection do most investors maybe need but they’re overlooking?

Tim Baldwin (12:07)
⁓ Well, I mean we think of protection a lot of times we think of insurance there are ⁓ Probably some lessons to be learned in that regard. I actually do know some landlords who try to get as little insurance as possible I mean it is expensive in Florida, you know, there’s Problems right now with insurance premiums and that sort of thing but having a good liability protection policy ⁓ Is is crucially important because when that event happens that needs to be covered by insurance?

That’s something that’s very important. Having those umbrella policies in place as well. ⁓ Structuring your business properly to help limit personal liability. know, a lot of times what ends up happening if you have a large portfolio is you have sort of a parent company and then you have these ⁓ sort of smaller companies underneath that. So you’re trying to separate liability across the board. lot of investors will.

purchase properties in an individual LLC. So just that property is owned by an individual company. So there’s ways of structure the business itself to help limit liability, especially when it comes to personal liability. And then again, just you have to have the right documents. have to have the right lease agreement. If you’re a property management company, having the right property management agreement with the owners is also very important. really all the things that we talked about are

a really big part of protecting yourself from liability.

Michelle Kesil (13:30)
Yeah, definitely. And what are some common misconceptions that people have in regards to some laws or things that maybe they think they don’t need?

Tim Baldwin (13:44)
think probably a big misconception that landlords have is they can sort of just run their business any way they want to and it doesn’t matter, so to speak. ⁓ For example, ⁓ landlords who ⁓ maybe just download a form from like Zillow or some generic place thinking that that doesn’t have a real significant impact on their business, but in fact it really does. So I see landlords sort of treat it.

more flippantly than they need to and not really look at themselves for what they are and that is they are a business that provides housing and nowadays there is a lot of scrutiny with the housing market. There’s a lot of scrutiny from government agencies, from tenant advocates, ⁓ from even media and so you have to take the business very seriously and take the right steps to ensure that you’re doing things properly, that you’re documenting

⁓ Every step along the way that if there’s ever an accusation made against you you can go back and look to see what happened What steps you took to properly? ⁓ Act or respond to a situation ⁓ So all of that all that is I think just necessary nowadays You see a lot of times too when people sort of become a landlord by default Maybe they inherited property or maybe they can’t sell their home or homes and so they sort of become a landlord by default and they

They sort of treat it that way. I’m just going to try to find a renter They don’t do the proper due process or do ⁓ diligence to screen those tenants ⁓ And so they don’t really know who they’re putting in the property whether they qualify or they have you know criminal history and all these types of things so you do have to make sure that from the time you list your property and Receive those applications to the time you place that tenant in the property. You’ve got to treat it

like a business and always assume that you could get sued. know, document, document, document.

Michelle Kesil (15:36)
Yeah, absolutely that’s important.

And what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next within your business?

Tim Baldwin (16:26)
We are trying to solve the problem of the landlording process itself. So we’re helping ⁓ landlords to do this the best that they can, the most effective way, efficiently, and the least cost. So that’s sort of the very broad approach that we take with any sort of landlord, whether you own one property or a thousand properties. It’s how do you make your business easier to operate and reduce those risks of liability as much as you can. So that is a big part of our…

Our vision and our services that we we offer landlords And as far as scaling is it’s really that the same vision but on a larger and larger scale So, you know, we are statewide in Florida. We have clients from Pensacola all the way down to Miami So some of our clients are nationwide apartment communities and others are just local here in Pensacola or maybe Tampa or every case may be and so it’s trying to just

give our services to the most amount of people that we can and to help them the most that we can.

Michelle Kesil (17:27)
Yeah, absolutely. And are most of your clients single-family investors or ranging for all type of investments?

Tim Baldwin (17:37)
It really varies the type of clients that we have. So it could be the individual who just has one or two properties that they ⁓ are renting out here locally, all the way up to again, the nationwide apartment communities. So it’s a broad scope of any type of landlord or property owner in Florida. ⁓ quite frankly, a lot of the ⁓ sort of the processes and procedures are pretty similar for these types of landlords. ⁓

Though there are different challenges that you’ll see with a small landlord versus a large landlord. ⁓ So we just have to cater our approach based on the needs and the primary needs that those clients have.

Michelle Kesil (18:20)
Yeah. And what advice would you give to a newer investor or someone that’s early on in their journey?

Tim Baldwin (18:29)
Well, I would say if you’re looking at buying properties that you should you should look at those properties. ⁓ We have had, ⁓ you know, clients contact us ⁓ saying, hey, they bought a piece of property that they thought was in a certain condition. And then lo and behold, it was something other than what they thought. And so and so out of that comes the question of, can we sue the seller because they didn’t disclose certain things or whatever?

But you really should be looking at the property. If it’s not you, then hiring an inspector to give you a report about the property so you know what the conditions are before you buy it. So that’s a really big one. And then, of course, if you do see that there are problems, especially when it comes to the essentials of what’s required under state law. So like for an example, in Florida, we have an implied warranty of habitability.

which is contained under 83.51 of our Florida statute. So you have to look at those essentials and say, does this house meet those standards? And if they don’t, then you need to bring those standards up to what the law requires because otherwise you’re gonna get a tenant in there and within a short period of time, that tenant’s gonna be making complaint after complaint, it’s gonna deteriorate the relationship really quickly and it’s just gonna be a mess.

So trying to get that property in as habitable condition, good condition as you can, and then find those qualifying tenants. mean, those are primary ingredients for someone who is getting into this business. And then of course, from there, it’s also making sure that you have all those essential documents that you need to make sure that whenever you do find that tenant, or even that the attendant is applying for that property, that those agreements are in place, that you’re protecting yourself.

so that when the time comes where you have to enforce those obligations on the tenant, you can do so with confidence.

Michelle Kesil (20:13)
Yeah, absolutely. And do investors, landlords work with you throughout the entire process, like start to finish?

Tim Baldwin (20:24)
Yeah, if it’s something where we’re really just walking through a problem with the client and it hasn’t turned into litigation yet, ⁓ then most of the time we try to just work with the client to determine, you know, what’s the problem? You know, here are the steps you could take, here are the possible outcomes. So we try to give them an analysis so that they can make a decision on kind of which step they want to take and which ones are the best steps to take.

⁓ So that’s sort of the pre-litigation. So it’s what you consider general advice or advice based on the particulars of their situation. If it happens that there’s litigation, then most of the time, you know, we handle that without the client having to be heavily involved. You know, if we need to bring them in for questions or, you know, situations that we need their intake on, then we’ll do that. But most of the time, we’re able to handle those without a lot of their involvement.

Michelle Kesil (21:17)
Yeah, amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Tim Baldwin (21:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Michelle Kesil (21:20)
Well, before we begin to wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more, where can people find you?

Tim Baldwin (21:27)
Yeah, they can go to our website which is pmlawsolutions.com They can use the intake forms there, the comment forms. They can reach us that way. If they want to find me on LinkedIn, that’s also an easy way to find me. It’s just Tim Baldwin and they can message me there. I’ll be glad to talk to them.

Michelle Kesil (21:44)
Perfect, we’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Tim Baldwin (21:48)
Thank you, Michelle. Thanks for having me.

Michelle Kesil (21:49)
And for the listeners tuning in, you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Tim who are building real businesses and we’ll see you all on our next episode.