All Forum Posts by: Carlos Ortega

I had considered an MTR, medium-term rental, using FurnishedFinder or another specialty profession-based platform for nurses, soldiers, professors, etc. The leasing agents I'd spoken to (big surprise, since they make money from renting long-term) advised against it because of neighborhood restrictions, cheapness of furnished apartment homes, and management (if you have a 3br, will you be renting to 3 nurses and managing any conflicts/turnovers/drama?).

So my cute lil brand-new build sits vacant, but I'll be considering the STR route if I continue to hear crickets. Let's get some funding together to get a MLB-affiliated minor league squad or build a new Vegas Sphere in the LBK to get that STR market smoldering! ;)

They're fine for buying a turnkey, older home that gets "spruced up" and comes with a 1-year warranty on their repairs. Especially if you don't have the time or know-how to do it yourself. It's the one-year required management agreement at 10% that can get you (although you can re-up the following year at a discount if you pay the entire year at once).

What you definitely need to avoid is leasing through them, should your property become vacant. See, it's a snazzy start-up where everything is remote (besides their main office in SF) and they got da fancy "algorithms" & da nifty "machine learning" with a coefficient quadratic equation here and a pythagorean theorem there that tells them what rent should be and tenant profiles you should look for. Say you got a neighborhood in suburban Georgia with a certain type of industry in the area, well, okay, cool, but you're gonna have a 24-year old recent Berkley graduate still living with their parents to manage the property! Because see, they've got a script & the software to tell them how to respond to tenants & owners, what the cost of a repair or appropriate vacancy rate should be, etc... see where this is going?

Without proper boots on the ground, your property will never get the proper love & respect it truly deserves (I get it. It's an investment. It's a dollar figure on a spreadsheet. But it's also A HOME). If it sits vacant for months at a time, the data model gets recalibrated and they'll tell you to lower your rent calibrations, but maybe what it needs is someone to tell you "you know what? yellow walls don't really work in this city" or "actually, there's a bottomless pit in the front lawn that is putting people off". But because Doorvest relies on a Zillow feed to feed their data monster, they may not know you have a portal to the 7th layer of Hell located on your property. "It looked fine on Google Maps!" 

So... if I were to advise a friend, I'd tell them, sure, if you really wanna buy, this platform is fine, just like Roofstock is fine, if you really don't have a team built out and trust built in to find better deals & opportunities. But please for the love of all that is good, plan your exit strategy with their property management, because that has been a giant dud for me and do not see it getting any better should they continue the hands-off, digital approach to placing & managing tenants.

Sorry for the late reply. They were fine in securing the property and the purchase process was simple. They require you property manage through them for the first year though, at 10%. My home went vacant and it's still empty. They're not boots-to-the-ground and they pull from "proprietary" data and run models through their algorithms (starting to see where this is going?) for the appropriate rent & renter profile. Well guess what when the data is faulty and they think your house has 400 less square feet than it actually has and it has an extra bedroom but their algorithms don't catch that, they're not really getting you the best bang for your buck, are they? Also, they're located in SF and their "managers" are all Gen Z college graduates who follow a script & stick to a formula. They're probably living with their parents and have never rented a place of their own, much less manage one. 

So in conclusion, they're fine for buying a house and getting it fixed up a certain way but FORGET about having them manage it for you. Absolute nightmare.