New Kansas City Investor: Intro, Post & Questions

[Spencer Davis]

Hello All,

My name is Spencer Davis. This is my first post, my first question as well as my introduction. I am a new to real estate investing but have been observing from the sidelines for several years now. For 10+ years, I have been involved in commercial real estate business on the construction management and leasing side. My area of focus is buy/hold with value add opportunity for small multi family residential units around KS and MO. 

I am originally from Kansas City and I just moved back about a year ago. I have lived in a nice SFM for a year now but I want to move out make it my first rental. The property will no doubt cash flow but with my current SFM becoming my first rental, I was wondering if there is anybody out there that knows of a good RE accountant locally. Also, does anybody have any input on creating LLC's for your different properties? Going forward, I would like to create different LLCs for my properties to help mitigate the risk but don't know if this is an industry norm in the residential world. 

Any input would be greatly appreciated and once again I am glad to be a part of the BP community. Thanks! 

[Timmi Ryerson]

I hear you about a different LLC for each property but really it is one business. If you have a good property management software you can put the properties in as separate entities and pull reports for them as separate entities. You can also compare your profit margins for each property with reports pulled from your software. I suggest that you consider only one LLC and maybe ask an accountant about sub entities for each property. If you are trying to protect each property from risk of problems from another property then you need to be sure you are educated about property management and the ways to protect tenants from suing you and attaching other properties. I have owned properties for over 32 years and have never been sued by a tenant. So if you use best practices in property management, you probably do not need to protect the other properties individually against each other. Good luck.