Today is a special day for me, it is the day that our only property on a well get’s a drilled well to replace the dug well. It is an expensive project that you can’t really see or enjoy since it is an expectation to have clean flowing water at all our rental properties.

Way back when we bough this property I was cautious almost to the point of being skeptical about buying a property on a well. I hired a plumber to run what they call a pump test. This property passed with flying colors, basically a fire hose pumped water out of the well for 5 hours with no sign of stopping.

We bought this amazing old house that was steeped in history, including time spent as a hotel (one of the guest logs is in a local museum). as well as various boarding house, B&B and apartment type set ups. We chopped it into 4 clearly defined units consisting of a 1bdr, 2 – 2bdrs and a 3 bdr.

The water supply was great until one fall day in 2015 our property manager received a call that their water was not working. It turns out the well ran dry. Our property manager had a water truck refill the well, the pump was restarted and all was good again, until it wasn’t.

This lack of water routine became an annual occurrence at least once per year until now. What is odd, is that ironically we did not run out of water this year, the very year we decided to have a drilled well replace the old dug well.

I am not a well expert, however, I guess the theory is that a drilled well can go much further into the ground. For example a dug well might be 50 feet or less VS a drilled well that could be 800 Ft plus.

The other side of all this, is that I am not sure if it is just the well water, but this property goes through more appliances and needs more appliance repairs than any of our other properties.

This new drilled well should solve any future water problems, or atleast that is the hope. It will also up our customer (AKA tenant) service game. It must have been annoying to run out of water once per year.

Providing good clean on demand water is a basic expectation from all tenants.

Special thanks to our amazing property manager Justin Wood (ABC Property Management)

and

JT Levings Well Drilling Limited (Jason Levings)

Have you had a good or bad experience with a well?

Comment below with your thoughts on buying rental properties that have wells.

Until next time,

Design your landlord experience,

Michael P Currie

Landlord by Design

Get a copy of my book on property management right here!

Photo Credit goes to Justin Wood – ABC Property Management