All Forum Posts by: JT Spangler

@Darwin Crawford The company's been around for a minute, and is generally well regarded. Of course, with something like this anything can always happen. 

@Kevin Manz It comes with two CTs that you clamp around the main feeds, and then you land a wire on the neutral bar and a spare breaker. The more expensive version the company sells will "learn" which loads represent what in your house, so they'll tell you when someone turns on the oven, hair dryer, or whatever. It's not something you are going to install, and then move and re-install, though. If you wanted that functionality you'd be much better served with a Kill-A-Watt.

If you have that many properties, you could put together a one sheet for each of them and send out a pdf packet for a quote yearly. That would take a few hours one time and minutes thereafter. 

Although I also think it's worth examining your mindset: instead of an action giving you a result you weren't hoping for being classed a "waste of time", just think of it as an intelligent way to make sure your operating at optimal efficiency. Which takes a tiny fraction of any one day, once a year.

Do you have a source for that? My gf is actually looking for a unit in Riverside Condominiums so we've been researching that very topic. I haven't seen anything written anywhere official that says condos are exempt from STR permits.

 Fair enough. I have good insurance and a good relationship with my agent, but I haven't found insurance to ever go down of its own accord. So as long as it's worth my time I'm going to call every year.

Nashville is so hot now that I think your best shot if you want to stay in the city limits is to learn the markets, hit the courthouse auctions, and pay cash for your first flip. Make it a slam dunk and then rinse and repeat.

 I'd love to have one broker, but with properties in multiple states I haven't yet found a good one that can underwrite everything. Plus, competition drives the free market. :)

And between umbrella policy and liability for each property (with replacement cost, not current value), I hope I'm adequately insured. My agents/brokers all know that I'll switch based on price at any time provided that coverage is still sufficient to make me or anyone injured whole should it be needed.

I have a hard time imagining a scale where my time is so valuable that I'd rather not save a few hundred dollars (per property) with a phone call annually. I suppose if I had 30+ units, but then I'd have the infrastructure to delegate that task. But there's nothing I've done so far this year that came close to the ROI for double checking my insurance policies.

Or it may just be a failure of imagination on my part.

Downtown Nashville has no more STR permits available for non-owner occupants, as I understand it. Am I missing something?

I was pulling together 1098s so I can do 2015 taxes (normally I like to procrastinate, but this year I'm trying to refi some things so I'm motivated), and I noticed I got an escrow bill for nearly a thousand bucks.

What happened was my insurance on a rental got canceled because the mortgage company had a paperwork screwup and didn't send in the payment in time (even though they had the money in escrow specifically for that). My agent had to requote because the insurance company wouldn't reinstate, and when the agent looked around the best policy she found was twice as much money. An extra $85/mo was scheduled to come out of my pocket (and out of my cashflow!).

So, I called all of the agents I work with and had them quote the property as well, and one of them got it back down where it was before.

One hour on the phone and an extra $1000 this year in insurance savings goes into my pockets. It was a reminder to me that I should really do this every year.

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