All Forum Posts by: Andrew Cameron

It depends on when during the rental process the deal falls apart.  Depending on where/what the issue is lowering the rent may not help you out at all.  

I have no answers for you, just LOTS of questions.

Here are my questions:

Are you getting any calls about the units or no contacts at all?  If you're below market rents and not getting any calls is there a problem with your ad or do you need to place the ads somewhere else?

Are you getting calls but not setting up any showings?  Is there another way to handle those calls?

Does the process fall apart when they view it?  Maybe there's another problem with the apartment?  Is it clean?  How does it smell?  Maybe you need to add another service?

Or do you lose them when you do the screening?  Are you attracting the wrong kind of tenant?  Maybe you've got to revisit your ad and where you've posted it.

I had thought about putting in a wi-fi service and offering it to our tenants, so that I could use the wi-fi for cameras, water-leak detectors, and other sensors.  My conclusion was that I could make some money off selling wi-fi services to the tenants, but I didn't want to the IT headaches.

I'm actually thinking of offering a tenant $5/month (or reduction of their rent by $5) to piggy-back the sensors/cameras/etc off their wi-fi.

@Dan K.  Thanks for the comments on my new website.  I just started it the first of December and am really enjoying writing and creating content on the site.  When I started out I got a lot of help, and my site is a hope to repay that help.

How have you found working with a part-time PM?  I've always been hesitant on bringing on a part-time PM because I've always wanted the person available during full-time hours.  

I made a similar decision when I looked at lawn care and snow removal, I got prices from sub-contractors and for a little bit more money I could get someone full-time.  

Thanks for the thoughts Jeremy.  I can absolutely charge this tenant for the damage, the difficulty will be collecting the money from her.  That's the biggest problem.

The unoccupied house was a 100 year old house that we owned before we built again.  I'd actually thought about bringing our propane construction heaters over to stop the pipes from freezing, but thought that could cause worse troubles.  Have you used any of the propane heaters you described?

Appreciate the comments on the site, it's something I just started the first of December.  Hopefully you're able to learn something from it.  I may take you up on that coffee in Truro sometime.  

@Dan K.  How many units do you have?  I'd think the size of your business would justify bringing PM in house or now.

We have 163 units and we do our PM all in-house.  IN fact we're at a point where we're going hang out our shingle and do PM for other people too.

I live in Nova Scotia, Canada and it's been a tough winter already.  I thought I was ready for the winter.  I had all of our snow equipment serviced, our bags of salt were all stacked nicely, and snow shovelers were lined up.  I thought I was all ready.  

Well it turns out that I wasn't.  Two things happened, I had a tenant leave a window open and one of her hot water baseboard pipes burst.  Second, we had a 24 hour power outage in one of our older unoccupied houses and I thought all the pipes were going to freeze.

I realized I need to make a plan for dealing with burst pipes, and for dealing with longer power outages, both for managing tenants and managing buildings.  Has anyone else created a document or plan like this before?  Any thoughts, comments, or starting points?

Bad Idea. 

If you can get average a 7.2% return for the next 20 years, then using the rule of 72 (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/ruleof72.asp) you would double your money twice.  Basically, your $1,000,000 investment would then be worth $4,000,000.  There are lots of assumptions to get a 7.2% return, and it would be hard and disciplined work to get the 7.2%.  But, it is doable.

Absolutely.  We've gone out and fixed the problem the first time, our issue was with people not rinsing dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.  We then sent them a letter afterwards explaining what they did, why it's wrong, and that we will charge them for the repair next time.

It's worked for us and haven't had to be back out yet.

@Kristen Ray  Also double check on fire regulations on older multi-unit buildings.

@Anthony Gayden  What do you usually do with radiated heating?  And by that do you mean old cast iron radiators?

@Brie Schmidt I ended up hiring an appraisal firm to handle our appeals one year.  

Even in Chicago or Milwaukee, has the law firm ever had the situation where they appealed and the tax assessor said something like, "Well, since you appealed we noticed that your assessment is actually too low.  We're going to increase your assessment $50,000.  We wouldn't have noticed this if you didn't appeal."