All Forum Posts by: Alvin Sylvain

I'm curious to know whether you can use both strictly for the purpose of marketing the property.
After you have a tenant, Apartments.com looks to have more tools available, such as maintenance requests and tracking income and expenses.

This is a perfectly good question, and I wanna know two things.
1. WHAT is the answer?
2. WHY hasn't anybody responded after a whole year?

If you went the Cash for Keys route, then you have already figured to be out whatever they still owe you.

If you had even the slightest inkling that you might ever see the money they owe you, then you wouldn't bother with Cash for Keys. Cash for Keys means you've already decided to cut your losses and get them out in the most expedient way possible.

Quote from @Susan H.:

After receiving email about this new service, I posted a note in a FB group for landlords. Someone from the Zillow group (also a member) responded with this:

 OK, this post is a little over 4 years old now. I was wondering if mayhaps there is any update?

I would suppose that Zillow ought to be better at filtering out flakes, wanna-be's and crooks simply by virtue that the prospective tenant needs to have already paid a fee to Zillow in order to apply. I expect there are more flakes and crooks looking for a free application, such as through Facebook or Craigslist, who would usually try to avoid shelling out any up-front money.

I could be wrong of course.

David Greene has a book through Bigger Pockets on this very topic. "Long Distance Real-Estate Investing."

The long and the short of what I've gleaned from reading some parts of it is the following: You need to establish a good, reliable, on-site team.

Probably start with a local agent (local to where you want to invest, duh!) From there, you'll need good contractors for whatever rehab you'll need to do, repairs and maintenance, etc. Then you'll need a good property manager, who has access to good maintenance people, coz you're not gonna want to fly out there to fix toilets yourself.

If the numbers work out, and you can rely on your team, there shouldn't be any unmanageable difficulties.

I don't know your situation, but I've always considered that my keeping excellent credit would mean that it should never be difficult to get 10's of 1000's of dollars of near-instant credit using a regular credit line or a credit card. I know some people use the credit card as their first resort. It might be better as a last resort. I'm thinking, make your plans and try to have enough money to do what you know is going to be needed. But plans often go awry, "Stuff Happens," and it should be good to still have a nice fat credit card to fall back on in case of emergencies.

Also echoing what @Scott E. just said. If you have access to hard money, use it. Yes, hard money is expensive. I think that's why they call it "hard", coz if it was cheap, it would be "easy." But if that expensive money helps you complete the deal and sell at a profit, it's worth it.

 Everything is negotiable, plain and simple. Make a counter-offer and see what happens from there.

I suggest you contact those other AirBnb places and ask them what they needed to do to navigate the red tape.

Yes. Always try to keep to inflation, or a little under, because stuff happens. You might one day really need to raise the rent (unanticipated repairs, unanticipated code change enforcement, etc.), and if you hadn't already been doing that on a regular schedule, you'll suddenly be the Bad Guy (cue the Villain Theme dun dun duuuun!).

Obviously, if it's a choice between keeping a good tenant and raising the rent, keeping a good tenant should take priority, so you don't have to keep up strictly with inflation, e.g. it doesn't need to be 5 or 7 or 20% or whatever. But yes, raise it every 12 or 18 months, at least by the price of a cup of coffee, just so that it will be expected.

Another aspect is trapping the tenant in an under-market rent. I've heard of this happening, like the rent is never raised for whatever reason, then 20 years later they're paying a third of market or some such. Yes, a good tenant stays, but the tenant doesn't necessarily want to stay for whatever reason, but the rents everywhere else is three times as much. They're trapped!

Then later on you need to sell the place. So guess what's going to happen? The rent is going going go up by at least three times as much, and the tenant will be extremely unhappy. A percentage raise is bad enough, but a jump from the market rate of 20 years ago to today's rate is heart stopping.

So again, yes, raise the rent. You don't have to raise it to market, but you have to raise it. It's better for everybody in the long term.