All Forum Posts by: Anton Ivanov

@Rebecca Shine

My biggest "criteria" for property managers is that they were referred to me by another investor(s) who used them in the past. Meaning I don't cold-call or cold-search for PM companies - I only get them through referrals.

I also prefer larger and more established companies, as opposed to very small operations or companies who've only been in business a few years.

I think those two can be applied by anybody. The rest of your "criteria" will depend on what you're looking for and what types of properties you need managed. Nowadays I buy only multi-family properties, so I find PMs that specialize in those and have in-house project management and rehab teams.

@Nixon Davis

Sent.

@Benjamin Mann

No, I bought from Decas Group and have been overall pretty satisfied. I've heard good things about Spartan Invest as well, but haven't worked with them directly.

You have to be careful in Birmingham, though - it's a pretty depressed market, especially around the city center. Older homes, lots of bad areas/streets and most tenants will be Section 8. If you start going out to the suburbs, it gets better.

@Leo McNair

Sure, I'll send you the questions in a bit.

@Marcus T.

Thanks for the shoutout!

@Cameron Lange

I'll PM you both of those links.

@Bo Kim

Sent!

@Kendrick Johnson

Sure, sending it now.

@Ozie Jackson

Some things I noticed:

- I assume this is a commercial loan. Are you really getting a 4.5% rate on it? I've been seeing 5.5%+ recently...

- Vacancy appears to be somewhat low for a 5 unit at 5%. I would budget more, unless this is an A+ area?

- I don't think your expenses are unrealistic, in fact they look pretty good. What is more likely happening is the broker is either lying to you outright or last year may have happened to be good (no maintenance requests, no vacancies, etc.). In either case, I would take anything they sent you with a grain of salt, because I've seen incomplete or inaccurate numbers many times. Always do your own analysis (which is what you're doing) and use worst-case or at least realistic projections (not best case).

@Michael Steiner

It's very hard to give constructive feedback without knowing more about where the property is located, the types of tenants, etc. but the only observation I have is that if this is really a "C" area, you may want to budget more for maintenance/repairs (because these types of tenants generally do not take care of buildings as well) and vacancy (because you may have longer lease up times, late payments, tenants skipping town, etc.).

Other than that, I didn't see anything that stands out.

@Lindsay Wyatt

Just a word of caution about general/local "estimates" - in my experience analyzing 100's of deals - you'll be much better off looking up actual numbers for things like property management, taxes, insurance, etc. instead of using some generalized projections. Yes, it will take longer, but if you're seriously looking at properties you need to run very accurate cash flow projections. Otherwise you're basically guessing, which is never a good idea.

@Gary Huber

I don't think the BP calculator does it, but there are other calculators for buy & hold properties that allow you to specify rent on a per week or per day basis, which is more suitable for what you're looking for. Other than that, the basic analysis would be same - just make sure you're using realistic vacancy and other expense estimates.