Regular inspection, sir. Regular inspection.
Almost any lease gives you the right to do so. You can use repairs as an excuse if you need to.
Interesting point, though. We've been in our current house for 10 years, it's 25 years old. The polyurethane was sanded down and refinished around 1990. It has not separated or cracked at all, and the boards have separated in only one place -- at a threshold between two rooms.
Before that, we lived in our old house from 1981 to 1994, and I never had separation between any boards. Of course, that was a waxed floor, so I had to be careful and renew the wax frequently to prevent stains (and I wasn't always careful, esp. in the kitchen, it got away from me in a couple of places. Which is why I prefer the poly.)
Both houses were not spec houses but custom (we built the first one ourselves) with oversized joists and short spacing between the joists, which probably has something to do with it.
Regular inspection, sir. Regular inspection.
Almost any lease gives you the right to do so. You can use repairs as an excuse if you need to.
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I understand you aren't in this business, so I'll try to explain. This is a business and the way you make money is by not having turn over. If we had time to inspect all the units the tenants would find it intrusive. Also, if upon doing an inspection we determined that the floors needed to be done how do you do this with a tenant in the apartment? Also, the smell until the polyurethane drys 12-24 hrs is very hard to live with. All these factors, tenant irritation, smell and impracticality of doing the work in an occupied unit leads to a simple solution NO PETS.
There is no way to determine who is going to be a responsible pet owner and who isn't. Eviction is a long expensive process and you lose good tenants who don't want to be around the problem during the process.
What we are seeing now is pet friendly buildings are have occupancy problems because pet owners are finding these buildings have aggressive animals in them and the buildings are not as well maintained. I know because I get calls from pet owners all the time and they tell me.