All Forum Posts by: Jane Z.

Update. We had the leased signed today with some extra paper work from the relocation agent who works for the company. It seems that the company will guarantee the lease if, for some reason, the employee could not complete the lease. Sounds pretty good.

Thanks again. I have sent them the lease agreement. It turns out their company's attorney needs to review the lease before they could sign it even though they are responsible for the rent. Sounds complicated. Anyway I will give them a shot.

Thanks for your information. We have decided to accept their applications at this time.

We had a nice couple applying for our SFR. Everything looks good except they don't have SSN yet. So I could not run their credit reports. The couple originally comes from Australia and works for a big international company. They worked for the company's Australia location 7 years ago, then relocated to China location for 3 years, and just recently relocated to North America under L-1 visa. They were told it may take up to 4 weeks to get their SSN. They have provided us their company's offer letter and passport copies. Their income is more than enough to cover the rent. The husband's LinkedIn profile I found online matches what they told me. Has any one of you run into this kind of situation before? I really want to rent to them, but I have never rent to someone without running the credit report first.

Gut feeling can not be trusted. Period. If you want to have easy time to collect your rent, you must check the applicant's credit reports. Here is an example. We had a nice property for rent. One of the applicants was an elementary school teacher,  looked very nice, and told us upfront that she has excellent credit score. When I pulled her report, sure it is, her score was more than 700. However, on her husband's application form, she either intentionally or unintentionally left SSN field blank. When I asked her specifically later, she then filled the field. When I run her husband's credit report, his score turned out only 400+. My point is that gut feeling could only be used when your have multiple qualified applicants and you need to choose only one of them.

Based on my own experience, the current ATL rental market is hot. Almost all of our properties are in Gwinnett or North Fulton County. We have rented 4 properties since January this year. Even with much increased rent, they all got rented out in one weekend. We always choose good tenants. But the quality of  the current tenants are the best I have seen so far. Those tenants that moved out this year all move out because they bought the house themselves. I guess the real estate market in general is very hot in ATL.

What we experienced in North Atlanta market seems different. Most of our properties are in Gwinnett County. The last three properties we put on the market. It took only one day to rent them out. For each property, we increased the rent a lot and still got multiple applications. It was a nice surprise.

We have more than 10 rental properties. Our handyman did work on many of them last year, but never give us any invoice until last week. We have very good relationship with the handyman and I guess he is not worried about our payment. So here is my question. Even though we only pay him this year, could we still treat this as last year's expense on our tax form? The handyman told us he has already filed his last year's tax so I guess whatever we pay for him will be this year's income for him.

Thanks.

I struggled with this question for a while before we bought our current more expensive primary residence. My conclusion is that it may not be a great investment, but nonetheless still an investment. We have more than a dozen rental properties free and clear, which generates more than $14000 gross rental income per month. My husband and I also work full-time. Before we bought our current primary residence, our living expense was less than $4000 per month. But my thinking was with all the money saved, we still need to invest somewhere, be it stocks or more rental properties. 

The home price has inceased a lot these days that it is not easy to find a good rental property any more. But we could still land a decent primary residence with very low interest rate. I think the low interest rate is what makes this primary residence a little more like investment. Besides raising my kids in a nice neighborhood is more important than buying one more rental property. I plan to sell this property eventfully when my kids go to college, and then we move into one of our rental properties. Since this property is located at a prime location, I do think the value of the house will be very stable, if not increase. When that happened, we could almost think we have lived in this house rent free. I have considered quitting my full-time job for a while because I could not stand my new boss. But this mortgage is what moviates me to try even harder. Now I views this job as an challenge to overcome.

The property management told us at that time that they evict average 1% to 3% of their tenants every month. So I guess they must have already gone through the judges many times.