What a Landlord Should Keep on File

Landlords in Ho Chi Minh City rarely keep any pest documentation at all, and then find themselves in a disagreement at the end of a tenancy with nothing but a recollection of how the property looked two years ago.

Six documents change that entirely. None of them are difficult, all of them are free or nearly so, and together they also make the property easier to re-let and easier to hand to a managing agent.

One: dated handover photographs, both directions

Every room at the start of a tenancy and every room at the end, taken on the day, with the tenant or the agent present. Include the mattress, the underside of upholstered furniture, inside cupboards, every floor drain and any existing damage.

This is the single most valuable item on the list and it takes twenty minutes. Almost every dispute we are asked to give an opinion on would have been settled in one message by this.

Two: treatment certificates and reports

Every treatment carried out at the property, with dates, areas and products. Keep them chronologically for the property rather than by tenancy, because the useful pattern is across tenancies — a kitchen that has needed a cockroach treatment under three separate tenants is a building problem, not three careless tenants.

A technician treating lawns, hedges and walkways across a campus

Three: a record of structural work

Sealing, drainage repairs, screens fitted, doors adjusted, termite treatment. This is the section that demonstrates that a defect was fixed rather than merely reported, and it is what allows you to say confidently that a recurring issue is not the same issue.

Photographs before and after cost nothing and are worth more than an invoice, because an invoice describes what was paid for rather than what was done.

Four: tenant correspondence about defects

Every message in which a tenant reported something, and every reply. This protects both parties, and for a landlord it establishes when a problem was known, which is exactly the question that arises at the end of a tenancy.

Keeping it also has a practical benefit: a landlord who can see that three consecutive tenants reported the same drain has a diagnosis rather than a series of complaints.

Five: the lease clauses that apply

A note of what the lease actually says about pest control and end-of-tenancy condition, per property, because leases drift over time and a landlord with several units frequently cannot remember which version applies where.

If the leases say nothing, that is worth knowing before a dispute rather than during one, and it is worth fixing at the next renewal.

A technician lifting a drain grate and treating the gully beneath it

Six: a termite inspection history for ground-contact property

For a house, a villa, a shophouse or a ground-floor unit, a periodic termite inspection with a written report is genuinely worth the cost. Termite damage develops over years, is expensive, and is never a tenant\x27s responsibility.

A landlord with an inspection every two years has a documented record of a building being looked after, which matters for insurance, for resale and for any dispute about whether damage is recent.

Why this pays for itself

Beyond disputes, the file shortens voids. A property that can be handed to a new tenant with a dated treatment certificate and a clean inspection lets faster and at a better price, particularly to foreign tenants who are unfamiliar with the market and are looking for reasons to trust a landlord.

It also makes a managing agent considerably more effective, because they are working from a history rather than from whatever the last tenant told them.

Where to keep it

One folder per property, in email or cloud storage, named by address. Paper in this climate does not survive, and a file distributed across three phones and an agent\x27s inbox is functionally the same as no file. Ten minutes of organisation once per property is the whole overhead.

Common questions

Is a treatment between every tenancy worth it?

Not automatically. An inspection between tenancies is worth it and costs less; a treatment is worth it when the inspection finds something or when the previous tenancy had a known issue. Routine treatment of a clean empty property is money spent for reassurance, and the certificate it produces says less than a clean inspection report does.

We manage forty units. Is this realistic at that scale?

It is more valuable at that scale, not less, because patterns across units are what tell you whether a building has a structural problem. A simple spreadsheet with one row per unit and columns for last inspection, last treatment and open defects is enough, with the documents themselves in per-unit folders.

A tenant is claiming a pre-existing problem. What settles it?

The handover photographs, and almost nothing else. Without them the question becomes whose account is more plausible, which is a poor position for either side. This is why the twenty minutes at the start of a tenancy is the highest-return item on the list.