The intricacies of renting out your property to a tenant are covered in their lease agreement. What do you do when a tenant wants to add on a garage or parking spot space and that rental isn’t covered within your lease terms?
Thankfully, it’s very easy to add a garage rental addendum to any existing lease agreement. To do this type of garage rental, you want to be sure that you create a complete and law-abiding agreement.
This agreement will protect your property while affording some benefits to your tenants as well. Today, we’ll cover the uses of a rental garage addendum and discuss all of the specific agreements that should be included when you are setting it up with your tenants.
By the time you finish this article today, you’ll have our free template to take with you to make your first garage addendum a breeze!
A Table Of Contents For Garage Rental Spot Addendums
- How Do Garage Rentals Usually Work At Rentals?
- Is Offering Parking Rentals Worth The Expense?
- Why Do You Need A Garage Addendum?
- Garage Addendum Template For Landlords
How Do Garage Rentals Usually Work At Rentals?
Parking can be a huge frustration for tenants if they live in an area that lacks street parking or a driveway, so there may be a need to provide some type of reserved parking. Even if your building has a parking lot that tenants can use, it might not be big enough for all tenants to have more than one designated spot.
Setting up a spot rental system for tenants that want to rent a spot or additional spots is a must for landlords that work in high-traffic or limited-parking areas. Without this type of guarantee, many tenants will pass over your property in favor of another.
How Spot Rentals Work
Depending on your lot or parking capacity, you might decide to include one designated parking spot with the cost of the monthly rent. This can easily be included in the lease or you can use an addendum to clarify the terms of this type of spot inclusion.
Beyond those included spots, you might have additional garages or parking spots available for your tenants to use. Those spots can be rented out individually for an additional fee to interested tenants.
Such fees are usually paid on a monthly basis, but they can be done on a yearly basis if preferred.
Parking Plans Are A Must
Regardless of whether or not you want to charge any additional fees for parking at your multi-unit, it’s essential that you give tenants a parking plan as part of their lease agreement. Otherwise, a tenant might invite over five guests with cars that will leave your other tenants without parking!
Setting up a plan with designated spots is key to keep tenants happy at your property. While enforcing these types of rules can be frustrating, it is important to upkeep the parking lot the same way that you would keep up with the properties themselves.
Is Offering Parking Rentals Worth The Management Expense?
Some people wonder if buying enough parking to offer parking spot rentals is worth the cost, the management expense, and the overall headache of keeping track of this additional rental.
Generally speaking, parking rentals and garage rentals are always a good idea when you can manage them.
In particular, this type of rental is very important to include in your rental package or add-on offerings if your properties are located in an area with limited or costly parking options.
In fact, you might even be able to make a good bit of extra money from parking rentals while still charging competitive parking rates. It’s up to you to decide to rent out parking spots, but keep in mind that it will affect the draw of tenants.
Offering Parking Spots Can Attract Better Tenants
In many ways, offering parking spots as part of a rental package or as an optional add-on is a great way to attract reliable and desirable tenants.
Tenants who are organized and knowledgeable about where they are moving are going to know that spots are a must, and they will not consider your property if spots aren’t available.
Finding high-quality tenants is a great way to secure the future success of your property and your business. Spending extra time on screening tenants is important, but you need to attract them to apply to your property in the first place!
Offering parking spots as an optional add-on in limited parking areas is sure to bring in a plethora of applicants to choose from.
Why Do You Need A Garage Addendum?
Now that you know about the benefits of offering parking options at your properties, you might be wondering why or when you need a garage addendum for those rental spots.
Addendums are a great way to modify your lease with clarity and understanding. The same benefits can apply with a garage rental addendum.
Simply put, you need to put something into writing that explains the agreement in place between you and the tenant. You can have a verbal agreement, but keeping up that agreement if a disagreement occurs will be difficult.
An official addendum, signed by all involved parties, can serve as a record of what the rules are and how they should be followed.
This essential lease add-on keeps everything organized, in order, and clear. In the rental industry, those are essential aspects of all agreements.
Garage Addendum Template For Landlords
Today, we’re going to share our template version of an addendum to lease garage rental form. This form can be used with any type of property, but it is most suited to a multi-unit building or condo set-up as it is currently written.
If you have another property layout, you can make small modifications to the form to fit your needs as well.
Check out our sample form:
| Garage Rental Addendum |
Garage Rental Addendum
This template can be a great tool for landlords who want to manage their parking spots in a complete and logical way but aren’t sure where to begin.
The document covers all the needed basics, and it is simple to add to this sample form. Let’s walk through the complete addendum together so that you can understand why certain things must be included.
Basic Identifying Information
Our sample forms always begin with basic information about the date, property address, and tenants involved in the deal. While all parties involved know this information, it is important that it included in any agreement.
This info must be added to the addendum to ensure that it is a complete, legally-binding document. Without that information, there is a chance that the document might not stand up to any disagreements if it isn’t explicitly clear. To be safe, you always want to start with these basics.
What, Where, How Much
Next, the addendum should state what garage space is being rented, how much it is going to cost, and where that spot is located.
Conveying this information can be very simple if you use this set of sentences from our sample form:
The Addendum is for the rental of a parking space/garage usage. The agreement allows for the parking of ________ car(s) for the additional total cost $__________ per month, at the following address: ________.
As you can see, the sentence has space for all the essential info:
- How many cars are allowed
- How much it costs per month
- Where the car(s) can be parked
Additional Agreement Information
Once the terms of the parking have been explained, you will also want to add information about any other rules that will apply to the agreement:
- If the space rental cost is included in the original rent cost or not
- Date the parking rent must be paid by
- How much notice is required to cancel the spot rental
If your parking lot or garage spaces have any other rules that you need the tenants to agree to, all of this information can be added to the addendum. Being as clear as possible here will prevent misunderstandings down the line.
Car Information
Use this addendum to collect information about the cars that might be parked at the property. Gather the following information about each car:
- Make/model
- Color
- Year
- License plate number
While you only need information about the primary cars that will be parked there, you can collect info on other cars that might be parked there from time-to-time. This will prevent the tenant from needing to give you that information later on.
Lost Garage Opener Or Keys
Another thing that is great to include in this addendum is info about what fee will be charged if the keys or garage openers required for any parking spots are lost or damaged.
Signatures
Finally, all tenants should sign to agree to this contract. Once signed into agreement, this addendum will become part of the rental agreement unless it is canceled according to the terms of the lease.
Keep Your Parking In Line
While you may not have ever considered using a garage rental addendum before, these addendums can be incredibly useful for organizing the parking situation at your property.
Tenants don’t want to have to deal with a parking nightmare, and you don’t want to, either!
Keep things organized and collect rent for the rented out spots easily by setting up each tenant that plans to park with the appropriate parking addendum to their rental lease. In a short document, you’ll be on track to have a well-run parking lot or garage at your property!