Medford, MA · Member since 2012 · 163 posts · 36 votes
What does upcoming 5G service mean for landlords? I gather cable companies will be displaced as internet service providers. Currently cable comes into house, connects to modem than to router which sends out wifi signals and also through ports and ethernet cords. I've been making efforts to wire my apartments for ethernet, because it is a faster more reliable connection than wi fi, though wifi is sexy it is just not as good besides the convenience factor of walking your labtop around the apartment. But if the source signal is 5G wireless cell service does that make ethernet meaningless?
What other implications? Tenants bills will go down? Landlords will have cheap monitoring connections for systems?
Also why don't we have a construction/maintenance forum? Real estate investing isn't all about finance strategies, at some point you have to manage the product.
Realtor · Longmont, CO · Member since 2021 · 577 posts · 631 votes
4y
I think things like this don't get discussed because tenants tend to not make decisions about where they will rent based off of ethernet availability. I say that as someone who is picky about my hard wired internet, but it is not something I look for in a property. I do think tho that 5G and other wireless technologies are rendering this discussion obsolete. In my house, I have over 1 gig of internet, that allows me to have 4 wireless 4k cable boxes, along with these cool little wifi range enhancers that allow me to hardwire internet from an outlet. This little box, that is not hard wired, outside of being plugged into a normal outlet lets me get 500mbps in download speeds on my computer.
I think that this can lead to an important discussion about 2 things. One is understanding the needs of your tenant pool in a given area. If you are in a tech hub, this could be more important. I think the second thing and for me the more important one, is it is important to not take our needs and wants, and apply them to tenants. There are things that I love in my house, like my custom 6in floor trim, that will not drive rent or a rentals value up by a way that justifies the cost. For me, it was worth the 5k I spent replacing it, if I spent the 50k across my portfolio to redo the trim in all my units, I would not expect it to increase rent at all.
Medford, MA · Member since 2012 · 163 posts · 36 votes
4y
I am in a tech hub (Boston) and I'm trying to go for class A rentals. I can run ethernet myself, cost is not really an issue, materials are next to nothing, I have a big spool of cat6 in my storage room the terminations in a box, it is just is there a chase to make it happen. And with work from home even if I wasn't in a tech hub people everywhere are working from home and doing more and more with internet.