All Forum Posts by: Bonnie Low

 We were paying our bookkeeper $450/mo plus I was spending another $90/mo on our Quickbooks subscription. We have 5 doors. To me, it was way too much so I decided to take on bookkeeping myself. Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that QB was too complicated for me to use. I looked at several different bookkeeping platforms and ended up choosing Baselane. It's easy enough for me to use myself and has a lot of other features that help me manage my rental portfolio and take more of the day-to-day management in house, like vetting tenants, collecting security deposits and rents and its other banking features. At this point, I wouldn't go back to paying a bookkeeper. The other benefit of doing it myself is that it's forced me to be much more involved and to better understand the finances of my investing business. It's led to better accountability. 

We fought with Quickbooks for years. It was very complicated and cumbersome to set up properly and difficult to use. We ended up having to pay a professional bookkeeper monthly to manage it. Between her fees and the QBO subscription, we were spending over $500 per month just for bookkeeping. And it was frustrating that every time we wanted a new report we had to have her set it up for us. Unless you have an accounting or bookkeeping background, I don't recommend it. In my opinion, it's overkill. For this reason, I was looking for a different solution that we could manage ourselves. I looked at several different platforms and ended up going with Baselane. It's easy enough for me to do myself. Very intuitive. And built by real estate investors for real estate investors so you get the bookkeeping categories you need with no extra baggage you're paying for but not using. I have multiple properties and LLCs, some I self manage and others I use a property management company for. It suits my needs, it's free, it has consolidated a lot of things I used to have to use different platforms for and I like the HY savings account. You may have already purchased QBO or are midway through using it, but if you're still researching, check out Baselane before you decide. 

Great questions! I'm in the same boat - looking to take all of my property management in-house. Currently I only manage my STR and MTRs but want to take over the LTRs, too. I also use Baselane for banking, bookeeping, collecting deposits and rents; Avail for tenant leases, Keycheck for background checks. I rely on reports from Baselane for income, expense reporting, P&L, etc and any other reports I need. I manage all vendor payments via credit card with dedicated credit cards via Baselane for recurring vendors like landscapers, cleaners and hot tub maintenance. What I feel like I'm really missing is a platform for handling tenant requests. Right now I do it all via text or phone call and usually only have one issue at a time so it's manageable. But I'd like something more formal and user-friendly for tenants and guests. Looking for suggestions on this.

Reach out to a local Realtor to find a real estate attorney in your area. They often have close relationships and can point you to someone who specializes in real estate.

Hi, Eric. I'm not sure what you mean by 'in series' but I can tell you how I have mine set up. I have 4 LLCs and a Holding Company. The LLCs are all under the Holding Company. I use Baselane for my banking and bookkeeping platform. I have set up a master bank account for the holding company through Baselane, then individual bank accounts for each LLC which are sub-accounts of my Holding Company. Baselane gives me the ability to set up virtual credit cards easily and with no fees. I don't have a credit card for each property simply because I didn't set it up that way - I could have but just didn't. I do, however, have virtual credit cards for vendors I have recurring payments with like cleaner, spa maintenance and yard maintenance. I know if card X is charged, it's the cleaner at my North Carolina short term rental, for example. It's very easy to set it up this way. It does require that you pay attention to the funds available in the sub-accounts, but you should be on top of that anyway.

Hope this helps!

I recommend you talk to @Patrick Drury. He is the Realtor I use in Columbus and really knows the neighborhoods well. He'll provide you with a synopsis of the neighborhoods to help answer questions like this.

You kind of have to separate out the asset protection aspect from the banking aspect when you think about it. I subscribe to the 'don't leave much equity in each LLC' philosophy. So with properties that are paid for free and clear, you have a lot of $ someone could go after with each property even when they are in a single LLC. We also use a holding company that holds all of our LLCs and I've recently put our holding company inside our family trust. It can be a complicated structure and you need to make sure you're doing compliance on each llC and filing the property documents quarterly and annually. It's a hassle for sure, but so so worth it should something every happen. I hear what you're saying about having multiple bank accounts to manage. This is another thing that I kind of think of as a necessary evil. I use Baselane and even though it's very simple to set up accounts and to have dedicated credit cards for each property, I do have to watch very closely that the deposits and expenditures go to the right account so I don't leave myself short anywhere. You could just have one master account, but I think that leaves you open to more complication when it comes to filing your taxes. This is especially the issue for me because my properties are in different states. I don't know that there's an easier way to do it. As you scale, you might want to hire someone to do your bookkeeping or bring on a VA to do it. In some ways, it's a good problem to have ; )

Bigger properties can be more challenging to rent as MTRs @Matt Mertz but then again, there are entire strategies within the MTR niche that specifically target larger properties. Specifically, insurance placements, corporate housing, and relocations. All of these can be very lucrative but you have to get into the right marketing channels. 

 I actually have gotten 100% of my tenants from Furnished Finder over the last 2.5 years. People struggle with it - both guests and hosts - but if you have the right property at the right price in a high demand location and you understand how to us it it can be a great option. What I prefer about it is that I am completely in control of my unit. Unlike Airbnb, no one can cancel their trip midstay without my ok and there's no one issuing refunds to unreasonable guests without even consulting me. A lot of people don't understand that it's only a lead generation funnel. It's up to you to pursue the leads. I typically get a lot of unmatched leads that I will reach out to if I need to, but my place usually books via direct booking requests on FF. 

I haven't seen any statistics on this, but anecdotally we're also seeing a lot of conversions to MTR, which makes a lot of sense if your property is already fully furnished and you have the systems in place for guest management.