It’s CRP time again I’m ahead of the game this year as I start to prepare to have these ready for mail the first week of January.  So you have about 6 weeks because Minnesota residential rental property owners and managers have until January 31, 2010) to complete Certificate of Rent Paid (CRP) for each of their tenants.  That includes any tenant that paid rent in the last year, even if it was for one month only.

So, get out the books, or whatever system you have and devote a few hours to sorting through the dates of occupancy and amount of rent paid by each tenant.  Hopefully you have the current address of past tenants… if you don’t you’ll learn your lesson.  I’ve learned through trial and error to have my tenants fill out a exit form making my life easier each time this season comes around.   If of course, you don’t have the address or the address is incorrect when it comes back, hold on to the thing until you get a call and then forward it to the correct address of the tenant.  It’s bad enough sorting through the dates of occupancy if you’ve had a high turn over, but having to sort through which tenants had adult roommates and divide the CRP’s between the roommates (even if THEY didn’t pay), etc., is tiresome at best.  It must be done or the landlord can incur a fine for each incident.

The State of Minnesota has made the small landlord’s job a tad bit easier, though, by giving us the forms online with the ability to fill them out ONLINE.  That thrills me because I can type faster than print and I only have to change the tenant specific information on each form I print.  Regrettably, the form cannot be filed online, but they can be completed and printed for distribution to the respective parties.  The form and instructions for filling it out can be found here.