All Forum Posts by: Brian Olson

I ran into the same issues @Andy Johnson. @Jason Bott and his team worked with me to come up with a plan and I'm 1) saving money, 2) spending no time dealing with insurance. As a bonus, Jason has been great to bounce a couple of situations off of and get advice. Just give him a call :) 

Hi @Steven Gersch - I've used both Rentec Direct and Hemlane. The short(er) version of my experience is that Rentec seemed awesome and they were...except that they used 3rd party processors for a variety of things and those 3rd parties were a huge PITA. Those processors are setup to deal with small retail businesses...not a landlord with a handful of properties. I tried and gave up.

Then I switched to TenantCloud and that was great for a DIY setup. I was with them for about 2 years or so but the maintenance side of things just never developed. I wanted to be able to bid out jobs, get estimates, pick a contractor and move on. With TC you have to find those contractors yourself. TC doesn't do anything to help you there.

Then in comes Hemlane. This is where I've been for the past few months (3-4). So far I'm very happy. They do all the legwork for your tenanted properties. They process the incoming maintenance requests, find a few contractors and get bids then ask you which contractor you'd like to proceed with. Fantastic. Everything has been awesome with these tenanted properties.

The shortcoming with Hemlane is that, although they advertise that they work with local real estate professionals, I haven't had that experience. They were unable to find me a Realtor on the ground to work with. Since they weren't able to find someone locally to help they are unable to do anything about turnovers (or anything that doesn't have a tenant in the property). At the time I switched I had two vacant properties so I ended up flying out there myself to put lockboxes on doors and find contractors to deal with turnover maintenance. Luckily I found some great help locally, a Realtor and handyman, but if you don't have these resources I wouldn't count on Hemlane. Great solution, just not quite what they claimed in my experience. If you know that going in you should be in good shape. 

I'm a remote investor and have been self-managing 8 properties using Hemlane for a couple of months. Overall I"m pretty happy with the platform/service. The gotcha, at least in my case, has been the local presence component. Hemlane has been fantastic for the properties that have stable tenants in them. I have two vacancies I've been working on any they 1) do not deal with properties that do not have a tenant in them and 2) were unable to locate local support (a Realtor) to work with me. I ended up traveling to the properties myself, meeting with some local contractors who can get the turnovers done and I don't yet have a solid plan on how to get them leased out other than to pay a contractor to do showings. Once they're leased I'll reactivate them on Hemlane so they can handle maintenance. 

NOTE: I have no idea how you'd use Hemlane and not have direct contact with the tenants. It's DIY other than maintenance. I suppose you could find a property manager than would agree to use Hemlane, but that seems doubtful.

I actually switched to Hemlane from TenantCloud because TC doesn't provide any assistance with the maintenance request itself. You can add your own "Service Pros" but you do all the work identifying the contractor, communicating between the contractor and the tenant (or connecting the two), and in general just dealing with the whole process yourself. TC is just the platform to enable you to do it all yourself, and if that's what you're looking for it's a great deal. Hemlane provides an actual service (assuming "Smart" plan is used) where they receive the request, work with the tenant to figure out what's going on and try some basic troubleshooting and then if needed call in the professionals and make sure everything is done to the tenant/owners satisfaction (pictures, invoices, etc.). Hemlane does this 24/7 for emergency requests (yes, I've had one in the past few months and Hemlane's response was awesome - had someone onsite in a couple of hours). 

As a 100% DIY platform TC is the better choice as it's priced far better and seems a bit more mature and full-featured. If you're like me and want to (mostly) outsource maintenance then Hemlane is a fantastic service but I think you need to have more than just a few properties to average out the high $34/mo. base price for the platform.

If anyone knows of a better platform/service to use that handles maintenance for you I'd love to hear about it, but Hemlane is the only provider with this feature as far as I can tell.

Good Morning BP Community - I'm in need of a good property manager in Columbus OH. If anyone has any referrals I'd very much appreciate it. 

Hi BP! 

I'm a buy-and-hold investor and I've found myself in an interesting place this week. I currently have 5 rentals under my own name and I'm in the market for a few more. While getting an insurance quote on one that I'm ready to pull the trigger on I found out that I cannot get a new insurance policy with my current carrier because of a pending liability claim on one of the current properties. This makes sense (kinda...), so I called a few more insurance companies and none of them are willing to issue a policy because of the pending claim either. I can't buy new properties if I can't insure them. 

I've been told that this claim could take years to settle and I don't want to be out of the REI game for years....that really derails my growth plans. I've thought of a few paths forward and hoping for some advice from this community.

1. Buy new properties in wife's name (she's onboard, of course)

2. Start LLC for new new purchases (I'm unsure how this changes lending capability or insurance needs)

3. Commercial/Master insurance for all properties (not sure if this would help?)

Maybe there are other or better options I haven't thought of? Any advice or recommendations are very much appreciated.

Thanks for the responses. I think what I'll do is send them a thoughtful card and tell them we'll give them a discount on the upcoming months rent. Thanks again!

Hello, 

I recently had a couple years of bad tenants placed by a terrible management company. We finally gave both of them the boot and I've now taken over the property management. We put a ton of work into the property to get it back into good shape and now have some good tenants in the property (as far as we can tell so far). The tenants have been in the house for about 3 weeks now and we've had several major repairs. 

We're taking care of everything, but I'd like to do something nice for the new tenants since I feel bad. If I were in their shoes I'd consider renting out unit a mistake and regret doing so. It's just been one thing after another that require the tenants to babysit maintenance on the home. They've had to take at least 4 days off work in the past 3 weeks to get repairs done (think bathroom flood, discovery of mold, etc.). 

I was considering sending a gift card but not sure what, if anything, is appropriate. Any thoughts or experiences are greatly appreciated. 

Thank you all for your advice. After reading all of the responses I have rethought my approach and am sticking with the traditional approach of handling all issues myself and not letting the tenant have a role in maintenance. Thanks again!

All great points. Thanks Everyone!

Thanks for the responses @Thomas S. & @Levi T.. You've made some great points. I had overlooked the possibility of the tenant actually doing the repairs themselves. This would definitely be bad. My intention is that the tenant would call a contractor and get the repairs done correctly. If I were to add a restriction that all repairs must be made by a licensed contractor this would alleviate that one. 

What I'm going for is that instead of calling me to call a plumber, they just call the plumber and send me the bill. Is this equally as bad of an idea? Thanks!