Taking into consideration all the pro’s and con’s Frank addresses in the bootcamp, I have pretty much settled on polly cart’s and will just budget for road repairs.
Is there a size/brand/type of polly cart trash can widely used by those of us on here?
A quick search tells me Ill be paying roughly $140 a can… 35 pads currently rented so lets call it $5k. A dumpster would cost me roughly $500 a month so even with the cap ex of road maint I still think cans are the way to go. It should really improve the look and will help justify my $42 rent bump in 6 months.
Also, if anyone has any ideas on how to keep them from coming up missing please let me know.
Will your local garbage service provider not pickup cans in the park? Our garbage providers provide the cans and service weekly. We pay the entire garbage bill for the all the cans in the park and then surcharge residents for garbage apart from base rent. Residents can pick any can size they wish.
Local service picks up but they do not provide the cans… that said, garbage service covered by the city/property taxes. I do need to check and see if they prefer a type of can.
I understand better now. With your property taxes covering the garbage expense I think I would have tenants purchase their own garbage cans. Send them a letter advising what can is recommended by service provider. I appreciate you want everything to look uniform but it would be so much easier to have residents responsible for their own cans. Cans get busted up, go missing, used for the wrong purpose, etc and after your initial 5k would be replacing several every year. You could require damage deposits for the cans but then you’re squeeze money out of everyone and amending leases. Just my opinion but my parks are nice but not pristine so garbage day will always be garbage day.
Yeah, I that has been a thought as well. If they were all new leases it would make a lot more sense. A roll of the dice for me at this point and a potential headache when one goes missing.
Regarding the damage deposits, I agree. I dont think its worth the effort for a $25 deposit and a park full of miffed tentas.
I would also send out a notice of rent increase and pass along the Trash Expense. You’d be surprised how people will abuse the system when you are paying for it, but will comply once they are paying for it.
Instead of having them get their own bin, buy them in bulk and charge the tenants for them. We used a set of Stencils and painted each space number on all the bins.
Another reason for this is the trash bin being over-stuffed. We were in a situtaion where the local trash company (Waste Management) installed a camera on the trash truck, if the lid to the Poly Cart was not completely closed with NOTHING sticking out we would get a $100 fine, per space. It’s pretty easy to send that $100 fine directly to space 11 when you can clearly see the space numbers in the photo. This also helped as we had visible proof of the offenders. “Good luck arguing your way out of that, fine, Mr. Space 11.”
If you include trash in the rent, you’d be paying these excessive fees; if you bill for trash, you can easily pass the costs on to tenants. For context, we had a few months with excess fees over $ 4500.00. The garbage and recycling are picked up once a week. One or two bins each week really adds up.
You may not be facing this now, but it’s likely coming soon.