Newbie in NYC With New Property Outside Atlanta

[James Craig Burley]

Good morning! We just bought a brand-new rental property out in Winder (ENE of Atlanta, about halfway towards Athens), and it's our first foray into being landlords! Everything out there seems to be growing. In fact, we fell in love with the area, found a smaller place (a 1.5-story ranch in the same general neighborhood), bought that too, and are moving there from NYC in about six weeks, selling our NYC condo.

I'm a software architect/developer consultant/contractor, and my wife is retired. I've put my work on hold for the past couple of months to get started as a landlord and prep to move, and have been enjoying learning about the RE business. (My wife has some experience with RE; one of her projects, just before retiring, involved coming up with the plans, getting approvals, and finding developers for a couple of properties next to her church's plaza, one of which is now known as One Dalton in Boston, MA.)

We picked Winder because my sister and her husband live there and they were happy to help find and get us started with a place. He's a landlord for his mother's house as well. My sister put in a lot of work getting the property and its website ready, but has had to bow out due to prior commitments, so I'm kinda scrambling to better understand what all needs to be done; that's why I joined this forum, as finding such forums is recommended by the NoLo book "Every Landlord's Legal Guide", which I got just last week (kinda late into the process!).

I've talked to a (Winder-based) lawyer already about the LLC we set up. He gave us the name of a CPA, but it's the busy season for them so I'm not sure how responsive he'll be when I call later today. And we'll probably need a broker or agent or somebody to properly market the house and/or a property manager to support it once rented.

Our goals with the rental are to provide ourselves some additional recurring income; make better use of spare cash we had just sitting in savings accounts; and meet the needs of (say) a large-ish family that isn't ready, or simply doesn't want, to commit to a mortgage.