All Forum Posts by: Charles Heistand

When you say northern MI where to you exactly mean? My wife and I have 2 houses in the Gaylord area. Houses in norther MI are still going for a premium and nothing has slowed down from the selling/buying standpoint. You don't have bidding wars any longer but houses still sell in just a couple of days if they are priced right. Is this house on or by a lake? When we purchased our houses (July 2022) on a small interior lake and just the frontage was worth $650 per linear foot! We paid 159K for our houses together and the 10 acres of land.There is massive amount of renovations that we are going through currently to get them to be just livable and will be worth several times what we paid for them. Once the renovations are complete we will also be turning both of them into STRs and use them for vacation/remote work when not rented. The appraiser gave no value to both houses and the barn because of the condition of them. A developer down the road from us is selling a new build on 2 acres at 1700sq/ft for 429K and will more than likely get somewhere around that because that isn't insane for our area. I agree with everyone else that you need to find another appraiser to look at the property because this doesn't sound like the northern  MI I know unless there is something we don't know about your property. I wish you luck with getting this property and enjoying norther MI like my wife and I do!

In southwest Ohio the going rate is a $250.00 non refundable pet fee and then an additional $35.00 per month per pet. Look at your local market to see what your competitors are charging. This number is dependent on each market and is hard for us to know not being in your market. Hopefully someone that is close to you will chime in.

Hello everyone!

Have a question regarding dryer vents at our 6 unit complex. The dryer vent to the outside is consistently getting clogged and appears the lent doesn't blow through. This happens on all 6 units and it doesn't matter if the tenants clean the inside lent trap or not this still happens in about 3 weeks time. When we purchased the building in July 2021 we had everything professionly cleaned and they were spotless and then in 3 weeks time the outside looks clogged again like they were never cleaned.  The dryer vents on our main house look completely different than these where ours have lovers that open instead of having a grate for it to blow through. Is it possible these are the wrong type of vent when someone replaced them at some point in the past where these are exhaust vents and not dryer vents? Is there something that I'm missing on this? I try to clean them out when I'm at the building but doing it every 3 weeks seems excessive since at my main house I never have to do this. Would it be the tenants responsibility to clean the out?

Any ideas or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Nathan,

Thanks for the reply.

That's what we were thinking to do was negotiate with them to have them help pay for it which is what the 6 month lease would have done. We have learned our lesson of not doing major renovations when the tenants are living there and especially under a M2M lease...

We only spent $750 on the carpet but your point is still 100% valid.

What we are hoping for and the carpet installers validated when they installed it is that we will be able to remove the carpet and put it in the upstairs bedroom and purchase the remaining carpet that we need for the other bedroom/hallway upstairs and stairs and have it stitched together. They said it would be new enough and not worn that you wouldn't be able to tell since they would have to stitch it together anyway at the doorways. Hopefully this is the case.

My wife and I aren't carpet fans to begin with but we couldn't determine what to do with the stairs since they weren't nice wood underneath and wood treads that are stainable are a fortune to purchase. Do you have any suggestions how to finish stairs without using carpet or wood treads when the entire unit has LVP?

Hello BiggerPockets!

Have a question regarding a transition from a M2M lease to a 6 month lease.

My wife and I inherited several tenants when we purchased our 6 family 8 months ago. One of the units asked us last month if we would be willing to install new carpeting which we said that we would be willing to do but we would have to raise their rent $40 a month and have them sign a 6 month lease to help pay for the carpet as where it was installed would be eventually removed and LVP installed when they finally vacated the unit and we did a full renovation on the unit. With signing a 6 month lease and raising their rent the tenant would essentially pay half and we would pay half unless they stayed past the 6 month lease.

The lease was signed on 2/24/2022 to start on 4/1/2022 because of the 30 day window required to change the M2M lease. The tenants came to us today and have told us that they will be potentially moving out on 3/31/2022 prior to the start of the 6 month lease. What we are wondering is if the 6 month lease is still enforceable because they will be moving prior to it starting but it is already signed and is now a legal document?

What we are trying to determine how to move forward at this point? Do we keep the security deposit? Charge them April's rent? Are we out of luck and shouldn't do these kind of projects again in the future prior to the lease being signed? Anyone else ever run into this situation before?

We are happy that they are leaving because we are going to fully renovate their unit and raise the current rent from $660/mo to $950/mo but are also irritated because we put $750 into carpet that is essentially going to be thrown away because in our area the rents we want to get required LVP to be installed.

We are going to reach out to our attorney tomorrow but wanted to see if anyone else had experience with this. Thanks for any advice that you are able to provide.

Thank you for all of the responses. It seems that there are as many ways of doing things as landlords out there! After reading through all of the responses I feel that we have some things to try for the next unit we turn. The biggest thing that we learned is that we need to do a better job of per-screening the preservative tenants prior to scheduling a showing.

I agree that we are trying to rent a place in December and that will make it harder but it only takes one person to be qualified to be able to rent the unit and we just need to find that person!

Our rent is slightly above the competition but the quality that we finished the unit to is far superior of our competition. We are in a solid B if not B+ area and are trying to attract the highest quality applicants in our area.

The nice thing is that we only live 3 minutes from our apartment building so its not a far drive but I just hate wasting time like we have been. We investigated the PM route but in the area we are in being rural we don't have many PM's that want to travel there and if they do they want a mint for it!

Hello Bigger Pockets!

My wife and I acquired a 6 unit apartment building in July of this year. Three of the units were empty when we purchased it. One of the three units was fully renovated and we rented it immediately after taking possession and the other 2 units needed renovating and have been working on one of them since. That unit is now ready to rent and will be starting to work on the final unit. We self mange the property which can be rewarding but can be very frustrating at the same time.

The most frustrating piece that we have run into so far is showing the unit to prospective tenants.

The first unit that we rented we did all private showings. We had 40 people reach out to us being interested, booked 15 of those people and only 4 people actually showed up for their appointment that they booked with only one application!

The second unit that we have that we are in the process of renting we scheduled an open house and tried to limit the number of private showings to those who couldn't make it to the open house to try to eliminate the wasted time we had the first time. The open house was a complete bust no one showed up and we sat there doing paperwork for 2.5 hours. (Good time to get paperwork completed) One of the private showings that we had scheduled because of not being able to make it to the open house didn't show up today.

Trying to get these two units rented has really shown us that people just don't follow through with what they schedule to do in their life. Both of us were raised that if you said you were going to do something you did it or gave notice that it wouldn't happen for a specific reason. I guess the world just doesn't work like that any longer...

The question that I have for everyone is what does everyone else do to show their properties to eliminate as many no shows as possible and to keep as much of your time as possible?

If you do an open house how long do you do it for and how far advance do you advertise?

If you do private showings how do you try to ensure that they actually show up? How long do you wait prior to leaving if they don't show up?

Do you collect the application and application fee prior to showing or after?

Anything that we should try different next time to have better success?

We are located in southwest Ohio which makes it harder to rent units in the winter which is why we are having some issues this time but the first unit we did was in July which I would have thought would have been a large rental month.

I would appreciate any help that you are able to give us to try in the future.

@Bjorn Ahlblad
Thank you very much for the information! The current 3 units are month to month and at the beginning of the new year we are going to be moving the 3 leases to year long leases so that we don't have the potential to experience turnover as much/often. I have looked at the rentometer and the current market rate for our area is as I stated in my original post of ~$900/mo. I'm just trying to avoid the 3 current renters of experiencing a rent increase that is too much too quick and not being able to afford the increase. We are going to be notifying them once we take pocssion of the property which will give them almost 5 months to prepare for this increase... I'm just trying to be fair but at the same time this is a business and businesses need to make money.

Hello BiggerPockets!

This is my first post on this forum and I am new to the world of real estate investing. I have been reading this forum for about 3 years and my wife and I decided to pull the trigger on a 6 unit apartment building in our town that the numbers look fantastic on and we are very excited and eager to get started but are also terrified because of the amount of money we are investing in this and want to ensure that we do everything correct and to have the greatest ROI that we can. The apartment building currently has 3 rented units and 3 empty units. 2 of the units that are empty can be rented within a couple of weeks of us closing in late July but the third unit is going to take some time to renovate because there was a smoker that lived in the unit for 13 years and nothing has been touched since she moved out... We will be renovating this unit over the next several months to get this one rented out by sometime in October. My question that I have is we want to raise the current rents on 3 current units but aren't planning on doing this until January 1st as to not make a potential 3 additional units empty and then we would be upside down on cash flow. The current rents for two of the units are $660 and we want to raise them to $725 and this is fair market rent for the size and condition that the two units are in. The third unit is currently renting for $825 and we want to raise the rent to $850 as this is fair market rate for the size and condition of this unit as it has been fully renovated by the current owners we are purchasing from. The one unit only going up by $25 is fine to do in one month jump from December into January when the new lease is signed but for the other units that are jumping $65 a month that seems like a lot for a one month jump. What would everyone else do if they were in this situation? Would you do the jump in one month or would you spread it out over say two months? I would greatly appreciate any insight that current landlords would do if they were in this situation.

Thanks!