Landlord advice: Section 8 tenants

**momof1in150** · 01-05-2009, 02:58 AM

The Broker I work for has several section 8 houses, what are your questions?

**TBH** · 01-05-2009, 06:51 AM

Well, I'm thinking that now would be a good time to buy a new house, but now would NOT be a good time to sell our current house. I was thinking of renting it just for a couple of years until the market recovers, and then we'd sell it and just own one house again. I've always thought this house would make a good rental because the mortgage payments are so low. I just wanted to see if it would make sense to rent it as a section 8 property. I've looked a bit online, and so I know a bit about how section 8 works, but I don't know how much rent I could get.

Questions:

* Does section 8 have a fixed rent for a certain size house in a given area? Or do you set the rent? I found something online that says the rent has to be "reasonable", but I don't know how to determine that.

* I knew one section 8 landlord who said that you can choose either to let HUD find your tenants for you, or find them yourself. She said she advertises for tenants herself and screens them.

* It seems like section 8 tenants would be better in some ways because the gov't is paying part of the rent so you'd be a little more assured of getting your money on time. Is this true? But the federal government is in such a tailspin, I'm not sure if it is a big risk to do this or not.

Thanks in advance.

PS. Just to throw some numbers out there, our mortgage (PITI) is about $600 per month, the house is a 3 BR, and I've seen a couple of rental ads in my city that advertised section 8 rentals for 3BR houses being about $800. But there's a possibility we'd refi this house to have a bigger downpayment for the new house, and then the payments would be more like $800 per month, so I need to find out if I can get more rent for this place, like $1000 or so, and if so, can I still rent it section 8.

I know I need to call the section 8 people in my city, but I thought I'd try getting advice on here at the same time.

Landlord advice: Section 8 tenants