All Forum Posts by: Bubba McCants

Having a good PM agreement in place is just the beginning of starting a PMC. I would advise finding an experienced PM to partner your company with if you are serious about managing properties and growing.

For a smaller portfolio, Buildium may be a better/cheaper solution.

I think your post was too broad to get many responses.  But I appreciate the attempt to open discussion on some very interesting topics. So, in hopes that we can get some participation, I will share some of my experience in a few areas you mentioned

1. Remote transactions - more states have passed legislation allowing remote closing with remote notaries. Title companies have been reluctant to participate, however, we just closed a loan in Texas where the borrower signed remotely using a remote notarizatiion service and the title company accepted this and issue a title policy. 

2. Social media and online marketing - we signed up with our web developer for a service she began offering early last year where you pay a monthly fee for continuous SEO, including updates on social media, etc.  our deal flow has increased significantly, and our income is up almost 100%.  Since we are hard money lenders most of our loan requests come from commercial mortgage brokers.  I have 15,000 + mortgage broker contacts on LinkedIn, and 13,000 have agreed to receiving our monthly newsletter.  

3. Crowdfunding - our commercial loans are syndicated through a series LLC with each series being a single loan. We have about 100 investors who have invested with us, with about 25 - 30 actively looking for more investments. About half our investors were previous investors; the other half found us through our on line investment portal. We deal only with investors who can prove accredited status, minimum investment is $50,000. Our average investor has $400,000 invested with us.

I'm unaware of any software that sufficiently manages long-term and short-term rentals. They advertise on different sites. They have different payment methods, payment plans, payment requirements, charges, marketing needs, reports, etc. Even if you found one capable of doing both, it would probably suck for both of them.

Great job getting started! 

We use AppFolio for all of our annual rentals. It is all encompassing but does have a few glitches. With the vastness of the program it is difficult to know and learn everything about the software. But, we highly recommend it. We used to manage STR but they very time consuming and the staff hates them. Appfolio is not conducive for STR. When we were looking for software it was apparent that you could use just one to manage them, you would have to have a minimum of 2 programs. One to manage the bookings and the other for accounting.

We used Lodgify but wouldn't recommend them. If we go back to managing STR's that we will just use the individual sites to manage the bookings. It may seem like more work but due to all of the glitches in the software it is easier.

Appfolio is all encompassing and we do not need any other software to manage LTR.

Reach out if you ever need help!