All Forum Posts by: Billy Linn

@Emily Hill I don’t spend time on it every day but my eyes are always open and wheels turning for the next opportunity. I always have my eyes on a few properties for when things line up right.

Right now good help is harder to find than good deals.

I also spend a lot of time working on my software that helps us run our business.

Always learning; about real estate, software, business, personal stuff, etc.

@Bryce DeCora that sounds interesting. I’ve wanted to use a graph database but I didn’t want to manage neo4j.

@Christopher Chen Nice, that sounds like a great first move!

I started in C# then was full stack LAMP for a lot of years but now I’m mostly backend with PHP. I have side projects in Python and Flutter/Dart.

@Natalie Kolodij I like that they keep my name off of the assessor’s website. Sure a person can go digging and find out things but it prevents an easy list of all my properties.

@Christopher Chen pretty good! Have 20+ rentals and a laundromat. If you keep your living expenses low your engineering salary will allow you to invest quite a lot. Buying and living in a duplex/four Plex with your tenants isn’t for everyone but thats what I would do if I had to start over.

What stack/language do you work with?

@Christopher Chen Hello! I’m a software engineer also. Welcome! Good to hear you are wanting to get into real estate investing. There is a lot of good info here.

Most property management software can handle those things. Most of them are free to try so I'd suggest trying a few. Most look pretty good at first but when you start using them you will find the limitations that you can or can't deal with. Also important to find one you can grow with, moving data or having to put it all into another system is no fun. 

@Jennifer T. Sometimes people will take the batteries out of smoke detectors to put in other things. It’s a lazy move and a bad decision, but that might have happened instead of taking them on move out.

Sometimes people just take things that they think you won’t notice to “even the score” in their mind.

One that really gets me is a tenant took the tv in a furnished place and was adamant that it was his and there wasn’t one there on move in. At least TVs are cheap these days.

I like to use excel/Google sheets for this kind of thing. Probably not the best solution if you want to store photos with them but you can put a link to your photo album in the spreadsheet too. 

@Trevor Ewen I’m going to have to pick this one up too since I run ads from time to time. There’s probably a lot I could do to make them better. Good suggestion!