All Forum Posts by: Bill Briscoe

Hi Blake, welcome to Denver!  I am a CPA, RE Investor, Finance grad and former adjunct Finance instructor .  Right now I'm entering the busy tax season so if you or anyone you know needs tax help, please let me know.  

Well, looks like prospect A is no longer interested in my favorable to landlord counter-terms. 

Our next prospects are an immigrant family.  One of the adults is an international student from Switzerland (I think they were both born in Africa) so he doesn't have a SSN.  Neither are US citizens but at least one has a job.  How do I background check such applicants?

We use Rentapplication.net for our checks, and they are asking me how to fill out the app w/o SSN

My policy says she potentially falls into the grey area where we consider multiple factors that might mitigate the "score", especially if additional stipulations are added for security.

Probably because its often not your own debt that you aren't paying.   Its very easy to get stuck with your ex-spouse's debt or for both parties to get stuck with it, and for the lawyers to advise you to not pay it until the settlement closes because they believe the spouse should pay.  So credit scores plummet while the slow wheels of justice churn.

No - rent is below market Value for size, location, and condition, but the house is above the price of the average rental for all houses on the market in our county.

Andrew - that is difficult.  She was married and is now divorced so only has 2 years rental history in her name.  And her current apartment is also her employer so she pays via payroll deduct.

How can you do a monthly and still collect first and last month's rent?  Wouldn't the first and the last month be the same month on a 1 month lease?

Would I need to structure it as a 2 month lease with 10 monthly renewal options to be exercised 30 days before expiration?

Tommy F - What I meant by above average is that $1275 is above for All houses and apartments in the county.  But the size/condition of the home is also well above average.  $1275 is actually on the low side for all Comparable houses in this school district (top in the state).

My buy and hold strategy was to target the above average market to attract people with above avg incomes/FICOs etc who are willing and able to pay above avg rents and price out the deadbeats - including the functional deadbeats.  If I dropped the price to say $975, I would get a lot of lower income applicants who currently live in run-down homes or apartments and are looking for something nicer but with a similar rent.

So why have we had 3 vacancies in 3.5 years?  Good question.  We advertise 1 year leases.  The first one began in October and was quickly leased - lots of applicants and we took the best one.

She was a single mom with older teens - no problems except that her mom contracted cancer so she had to move away after 6 months to take care of mom.  We let her out of the lease with 45 day notice and got it released with no missed rent.  2nd couple was middle-aged and kept the place immaculate.  They stayed their 1 year lease and offered to pay extra to go month to month because they were thinking of moving out of state if they could find jobs.  We accepted and they were month to month from about April thru Dec of '15, then they bought a downtown condo.  We then got a young married couple who had just graduated college so were looking to move in Jan 1 '16.  As was mentioned above - Dec/Jan leasing is difficult, but the recent college grads are most of that pool.  They have paid on time every month for the 12 months but are expecting a baby so they decided to downsize to an apartment to re-align their budget.  So that is the tenant we are looking to replace.  They moved early so I've been trying to re-lease and refund them part of their lease if we get a new tenant before year end - just to help with the baby expenses.

Also, I don't allow pets - bad experiences with another rental in the past.  So that probably shrinks my pool of traditional families with kids quite a bit.

Mike Cumbie: Good points.  Yes, I think we have enough strikes to decline based on lack of sufficient income history.  Also her payment history has a lot of gaps in the report - student loans from 2005-08, transferred to a $10/mo DOE consolidation since 2011 (which is current, but its peanuts), then nothing until an auto loan in 2014, which was seriously past due but now current.  Big gaps from 2008 thru 2014.  Maybe paid cash for everything or her ex husband paid bills?

Being single/divorced doesn't bother me - she just blamed the low credit score on her separation/divorce.