For all of you savvy ‘buy and hold’ real estate investors out there, here’s a great outline of the value of improving the curb appeal for your rental property by Al Williamson of leadinglandlord.com  Al’s blog is an ongoing thesis on how landlords can be a significant force for catalyzing positive change in urban neighborhoods- and as a result become the beneficiaries of those changes on a scale well beyond the effort and investment they put in.  (Keep up the great work!)

The concept of achieving higher returns through curb appeal is intuitive enough- if you make the property look better more people will want to be there.  If more people want to be there, it will be faster and easier to rent out your vacant units to qualified tenants.

The last part of that statement, renting to qualified tenants, is very important.  Al doesn’t touch on it in the article, preferring to keep the discussion to a simple question of the return on capital invested via a reduction in the vacancy rate.  As anyone who has held and managed a rental property for any length of time knows, the quality of tenant you put into your property will be directly proportional to the amount of time, energy, and money you will have to put in to manage that property.

If by improving your curb appeal you can select future tenants from a larger pool of qualified tenants, you should see a resulting reduction in overhead management costs.  When a good tenant moves out fewer repairs and less substantial cleaning will be needed to bring the unit up back up to marketable condition.  Good tenants typically don’t cause as much ongoing wear on the property.  Good tenants typically attract other good tenants, and the upward trend continues.  I’d love to see a breakdown of some of these secondary management cost impacts in a similar form to what Al provided with the vacancy rate.

How about you?  If you own and/or manage a rental property and can provide some insight on the relative ongoing management costs of good tenants versus okay tenants or not-so-good tenants, let us know.

One of the defining challenges of implementing sustainable design to the point of ubiquity is making the technology simple enough to be easily replicable with very little training, few resources, and marginal costs.  This solution is a brilliant (squared!) solution to the problem of lighting dark homes.

Solar bottle light bulb brightens homes and lives

The process is stunningly simple.  1) Collect discarded 2-litre clear plastic bottles, and clean all labels/glue off of them.  2) Fill them with filtered water and a dose of chlorine bleach (to prevent biological growth) and cap off.  3) Carefully scribe a circle the size of the bottle in a piece of tin, and carefully cut out a hole slightly smaller than than circle.  Punch the edges so that you get short teeth to form-fit around the bottles for stability and tightness of fit.  4) Seal the edge between the bottle and the tin really well.  5) Cut a hole to fit the bottle in the tin roof of the home, set the assembly into the hole, and waterproof around the edge of the tin sheet really well.  Voila!  A daylight bulb for fractional cost that emits a lot of light, transfers very little heat, requires no power, and costs very little in money or time.

Granted, the bottle will deteriorate in time.  Light bulbs burn out too, and they have the added challenges of an ongoing operating cost, fragility, and manufacturing complexity.

The idea could easily be translated into more complex and robust forms for integration into first-world architecture.  I recently was looking at pictures of a solar tube installation Matt Piner (Pinerworks Architecture) was working on to bring light from a rooftop down two floors to a basement.  The amount of light that can be transmitted down a shiny tin tube is surprising.  A simple water-filled clear plastic container could be installed at the bottom as the diffuser, and would help to reduce the issue of heat transmission through the tube.

What other inexpensive, low-tech solutions are just a concept away from reducing worldwide energy consumption and improving quality of life?  Let me know.