All Forum Posts by: Bonnie Low

Hi, Anastasia. You're on the right track to reach out for help here and also to look to your area for potential partnerships. I'd also like to invite you to join THE MTR Connect, a group I host that meets virtually every Friday from noon - 1:30pm EST. This is a group of MTR investors who have small to medium portfolios, but we welcome new investors who are just starting out as well. It is an incredibly supportive group, eager to share and to provide advice to anyone getting started. We're often helping each other problem solve our listings or helping with specific situations that are occurring at our properties. We share best management practices, systems & tools, and our networks. We have participants from all over the US so I'm sure you'd find someone near you. If you're interested in an invite just send me a message and I'll get you signed up. Good luck!

Hi, Lina! I'm glad you reached out for help. The community here on BP is great about supporting each other. I'd like to invite you to participate in a group I host called THE MTR Connect. We meet (virtually) every Friday from noon - 1:30pm (EST). This group is an incredible collection of midterm rental hosts who support one another by offering advice and suggestions, being a sounding board for each other, offering mentorship and collaboration opportunities and share our respective networks. I think you'd find it very helpful in your situation. If you're interested, please send me a message and I'll get you signed up.

Best of luck to you!

Quote from @Joshua Thompson:

If it helps, I asked many clients this same thing and learned the clients who spend time each month updating books and records are the ones who spend less than 30 minutes preparing everything for us. 

The ones using software are hit or miss if it takes less than 2 hours or DAYS! With software, it's only as powerful as its user so some clients overcomplicate things and spend most of their time trying to "fix Quickbooks".

The most successful and quick clients keep it simple or keep it to their comprehensive level.

 I definitely agree with this statement. In my experience, you either put the hours in up front or at the end, but either way you (or someone on your team) has to do it. I think I've done my bookkeeping almost every way you can - from not at all -> keeping receipts in a shoebox and handing over the entire shoebox to my CPA -> running 10-key tapes on all the receipts for each category and handing those tapes to my CPA -> DIY Quickbooks -> paying a bookkeeper to manage everything in Quickbooks -> to now doing it myself using Baselane. My current solution of using Baselane is by far the most cost effective and easiest, but it still requires that I spend time bookkeeping. And you know what? I've come to believe that's not a bad thing. It forces me to get real familiar with my business and how my properties are performing. I keep saying it's making me a better investor and that's probably true. But what it's really doing is making me a better business person. 

As others have said, the location is a big factor in MTRs, but so is the clientele you are going after. For example, I stay 99% occupied with my MTRs - the only vacancies are planned vacancies when I need a couple of days for a turnover. I am primarily hosting traveling medical personnel because there is a lot of demand for these professionals in our area and because my units are suited to their needs. They're also appropriately priced. I've had them long enough to keep pushing up rents so that I am at the top of my niche, but know not to exceed it because I'm just about at the point where if I raised rents another $50-$100 I'd be crossing over into the lower end for larger units. I use the FF stats page to see what average prices are by unit configuration and make sure I'm at the high end. However, a different niche such as insurance placements, might very well be in the 70%~ occupancy level but the rents are going to be so much higher that the occupancy rate (comparatively speaking) is irrelevant. In other words, there's no one size fits all occupancy target for MTRs. There are strategies that can be combined (i.e. MTR/STR hybrid) that could further push up occupancy rates in the former example. Set a goal for yourself based on your needs, your location and your market and shoot for that. Anything above that is gravy.

Quote from @Bailey Rentz:

I've used Stessa for a couple years and I just can't take it anymore.  My bank connection breaks multiple times a year, and we are going on 2 months with no offered solution from Stessa other than they are working on it.  I use a regional bank and it seems like Stessa needs you to use a large national bank to not have consistent issues.  I have enjoyed Stessa's interface but unfortunately it is useless to me if I have constant bank connection issues. 

Does anyone have any recommendations? I manage a small rental portfolio that I am slowly adding to, and also have a few flips going at all times. I have seen REI Hub recommended on here, but I am unsure of their ability to work with local banks, so if anyone has any experience they can speak of that would be greatly appreciated.

 Hi, Bailey - I have a feeling you're not alone in this. I host a group for midterm rental operators and I had 2 people in last week's meeting essentially say the same thing. I don't use Stessa and never have so I don't know what's going on, but I suggested they take a look at Baselane, which is what I use. Baselane is a banking and bookkeeping platform that was built specifically for real estate investors. I have found that it does pretty much everything I need it to to manage my portfolio. I switched from Quick Books to Baselane and I am SO glad I did. It has everything you need and nothing you don't, IMO. I recommend you do an online demo to see the features that it offers. It is very user-friendly for you as the landlord, and my tenants have had no problems using it as well. It's very easy to set up your accounts and to set up sub-accounts for each property if you want to, which is what I do. You can use it for rent collection, leases, tenant vetting, the list goes on. The revenue and expense categories line up with your Schedule E which makes it a breeze to prepare for filing your taxes and I like the reporting features, too. It gives you the power of a professional real estate bookkeeper but it's simple enough for someone who is not a fan of bookkeeping to stay on top of things because the User Experience is well thought out. It's definitely making me a better investor because I'm able to do my books myself now instead of having to hire a bookkeeper. Hope this helps!

Hi, Ben - I've been a Baselane user for over a year now. I give you kudos for thinking about this early on in your investing career. It's much easier to set things up right than to have to transition them later when you have multiple properties and many, many transactions. What I love about Baselane is that it was built BY real estate investors FOR real estate investors so it's really dialed in to what you're going to need in order to prepare your taxes, keep your books up to date and the more operational aspects of being an REI like tenant vetting and processing rent payments. A lot of people (myself included) use multiple baselane accounts and sub-accounts to keep things as clear as possible relative to each property. For example, I have a main account that is for my holding company, sub-accounts for each property, and sub-sub accounts for security deposits and things like CapEx for each property. I also use their virtual credit cards which enables me to assign a card to a specific person, like the cleaner for my STR for example, so when she runs a charge, it automatically drops into the right account in terms of categorizing my expenses. There are so many great features and I'm impressed that Baselane is constantly rolling out new features and truly listening to their users so that we're getting the features that are important to us. If I can help you further, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly. Best of luck to you!

Quote from @Miguel Del Mazo:

@Bonnie Low I went to check out MiniStays a while back, and it seems like a good site. 

However, I got caught up during creating my listing because it looked like I needed to have another account (Stripe? I forget; it was payment processing related) that required me to have a website for the business. I don't have one. As a result, no MiniStays account for me. 

Am I just dense (a real possibility), or did I miss how to navigate account creation without a website for our business? 

Thanks

Hi, Miguel. Jon Wolfe, the founder, is a friend of mine so let me put you in touch with him and his tech team will help you get it sorted out. I don't have a website for my properties so I know you don't have to have one. I'll DM you his contact info.

One option I haven't heard anyone mention (because they're still fairly new) is MiniStays. I know the founder and know that they've set out to build a platform that takes the best features of sites like Furnished Finder and Airbnb and leaves out the clunkiness and annoying policies and practices. I think they've done a great job of building their product and if you already have a property listed on Airbnb, it's super easy to import to MiniStays (though it's not difficult to list your property there if you don't.) I personally think this is the direction booking sites need to go. It's much more fully integrated, which works well for guests and hosts. 

I work with a lot of MTR investors and what I am seeing frequently with multifamily acquisitions, particularly with new investors, is that they often test the property just like you're mentioning, as a way to dip their toes in the water and see what works in their area and for their personal style. Typically, if they can make it work as an STR they go that route because it almost always generates the most revenue. Interestingly, though, people who have experience with STRs seem more likely to pivot to the MTR strategy once they realize how much easier it is and how well the renters treat their units. This is especially true with single family homes. There's no one size fits all of course, but generally the STR/MTR/LTR mix in a multi-family unit can be challenging because the way renters utilize these properties is so different. You STRs tend to be a little higher end and guests have higher expectations. MTR attracts a lot of traveling medical professionals and WFH individuals who need a quiet space during the day, which may not be compatible with families living in the attached LTR. So it really just comes down to figuring out what solution works for a given market, but it's yet another great thing about real estate: having options!

It seems like there's some confusion between the asset protection one would want to achieve by ensuring that personal and business funds are never commingled vs. the BMP of separating deposits to ensure they are available to the tenant when due. With the former question, if you are trying to achieve asset protection it's imperative that you don't commingle personal and business funds. Talk to an attorney about this because there is so much more to asset protection than just that. However, I think your question was more about the latter: making sure the security deposit is never touched until it's due back to the renter. I've been religious about this because I know how easy it is to lose track of what you're spending when it's all going into and out of a single pot. I use Baselane for my banking and bookkeeping platform and I really love how easy it is to set up accounts and sub-accounts for just such purposes. For example, I have an account set up for each of my rental properties. This is my main account for each one. But I also have sub-accounts set up for the security deposit and to set aside funds for CapEx. All of my day-to-day expenses and the bulk of the revenue flow through the main account. The security deposit goes into its own account and stays there, untouched. And a percentage of the revenue gets auto-directed to the CapEx subaccount. It's very easy to keep it all straight.