All Forum Posts by: Jeff Bridges

The income to purchase ratio applies broadly to SFRs and not condos. With condos, you have to pay a condo fee on each individual condo unit, which is an additional expense not found on SFRs, making that ratio deceptive if compared directly against SFRs. The kicker would be finding out about the condo fee and how much it would reduce your cashflow. Condos are also complicated because you then need to find out if there are rental restrictions in place because they could prevent you from renting at all or other restrictions. Then financing is also complicated because conventional fannie underwriting has some requirements with owner occupant ratio and no one owner can own a certain amount of units. So you need to know the rules on that by asking a lender. My recommendation is avoid owning too many condos in one building. If there is an assessment to pay poorly managed building, you have to pay it 5 times. Lots of risk to you and very little reward (you still have to have 5 insurance policies, 5 condo fees, prob low cashflow.

I have a rental property that I will be doing some energy efficiency improvements using local utility grant money through the energy star home performance program. I will be encapsulating my cinderblock foundation with poly and spray foam using professional vendor. I found out in order to complete, I need to fill in the void underneath the entry stairs so they can spray foam the foundation walls all the way around. that is the only place where cinder blocks are missing. Do I a) fill in with 9-10 cinder blocks or b) use cement board and just paint the cement board (probbaly the less expensive route. Its going to cost me around $900 to do it the right way with cinderblock, but I just want to make sure I havent missed another option that wont look bad when I go to sell. There is already an access hatch for the crawl space in the corner of the property so I have another primary access panel for crawlspace. Thanks for your feedback!

Jan 1 is a perfect time to setup the property tags and migrate to the new rental property bookkeeping system within Quicken. You can still keep your prior expense history and access historical reporting, but will be able to move forward to use the rental cashflow/ schedule E etc. specific reporting capability that is native to quicken. See if that would make your bookkeeping responsibilities less burdensome than before with projects and customers etc. but only if that takes less time than before for you. something to consider...

PJ did you know Quicken H&B now includes rental expense and income tracking? Instead of projects/ customers and other workarounds, you can directly enter the property, and it lets you "tag" a property to each bank downloaded expense and categorize based on the schedule-E categories (probably same as a project).  You might like to keep your current system for simplicity but anyone new to the software can setup rental properties directly and have access to rental cashflow reports (for all properties combined or just a single unit), schedule-E reports and  other real estate related reporting features. Just thought you and others should be aware of its rental specific expense tracking and reporting as I use and like the software for my own bookkeeping for 5 units.

More on the features are below:
https://www.quicken.com/person...

Here is an example of the schedule-E reporting at year end that you can easily generate if you keep up with your tagging property and categorizing expense type throughout the year. Makes it super easy at tax time since you can export a report to PDF or excel and pass to your CPA.

You are a first time investor/ landlord. The only people that will likely trust you to manage their units at this point with your limited experience and total lack of knowledge is yourself. When clients interview you, what would you say you bring to the table in experience and knowledge? If you make mistakes, the only impact will be on units you own. Until you start investing and earning cashflow, a PM business is just an added distraction, not likely to add revenue for you and unlikely to be successful in growing clients given your lack of experience. Additionally the commercial software tools like buildium and appfolio cost alot so you will be generating significant expenses until you have enough properties under management to offset those costs assuming you do convince owners to let you manage their properties. I would just self manage using Tellus, Cozy or others mentioned above and learn the business first and see if that's a passion and interest for you to grow it into a business.

I bought a cheap used Simplisafe system and deployed the wireless motion sensor and glassbreak sensor only. paid $25/month and was able to monitor on my app. easy to move and cancel service.

You asked the same question twice without clarifying. Can you clarify what you really mean? You generally get a landlord fire dwelling policy which protects your property against damage and all perils, enough coverage for my personal belongings inside the property (appliances and any other furnishings), and enough liability coverage based on how much personal assets you want to protect (I cover the total value of my personal assets using an umbrella policy and a landlord policy combined). Your agent can walk you through the different coverage levels and explain the different levels of coverage that they can offer for your particular policy and tailor it based on the type of property you own.

Yes. I add to my end of year Schedule-E as a rental/ business-related expense. It's a normal expense associated with landlording. 

naborly.com. Free to applicants and landlord. Online application sent to applicant via email is also fairly comprehensive. I used recently and the reports/credit/ criminal background checks were comprehensive and adequate.

Same. Had this happen earlier this week where I couldnt load an image: endless upload in progress blue bar, but never completed.