All Forum Posts by: Craig Cude

I used to use Buildium to manage my rental houses, and then I switched to Tenant Cloud to save money (only have 5 rentals and didn't need to pay $500+ per year).  It worked great at first, until Zillow started charging money for syndication.  Now, I must manually email Zillow to set up the syndication, wait for a response, and I've lost automation between Zillow and Tenant Cloud. I.e., if someone responds to a Zillow ad, it doesn't go to Tenant Cloud for me to respond, set up a tenant screening, or manage applications.  Also, you can't put a listing link within the Zillow ad (they'll scrub it).  Has anyone cracked this nut?  It's a real Sh*t show now, and very frustrating to manage properties through one portal, but still take advantage of Zillow's vast marketing network.  I feel like it's Zillow's way to forces out the smaller companies and further dominate the market.  Any way to have a symbiotic relationship between your management software and Zillow's advertising power, or are we destined to have to switch completely to Zillow Rental Manager?

@Andrew Postell thanks for the detailed reply. Condos can be frustrating, especially in CA where every HOA member is scared to death of being sued. The board president refuses to be contacted directly (unbelievable to me as a fellow condo owner), so I must go through the PM or attend an HOA meeting in person (I'm out of state). However, I'm not pursuing this any further because I got what I want--I close on the refi tomorrow.

Just to be clear, the appraiser did not fill out the questionnaire, the PM (HOA) did. And the only part that was a speedbump in the questionnaire was the fact that it doesn't ask "how many units are owner occupied?" Instead, it asks "how many offsite addresses exist," which a doesn't help to answer the Freddie/Fannie requirement. And when asked that more accurate question of owner occupancy (either as a primary or secondary), the PM's answer was, we don't track that and your HOA does not pay extra for that service (something I can certainly address to the Board for the future).

Still, I'm still confused on who "owns" the HOA/Condo Review Questionnaire. HomeWise is the service that was being used in that part of the transaction, but I read that they can provide service to both lenders and/or PMs. I'm not sure if the lender just orders a review and the PM uses their standard questionnaire via HomeWise, or if Homewise is a vender utilized by the lender and the PM just fills out the questionnaire they're given. Either way, since the PM was unable to provide the one data point needed, the lender elected to rely on the appraisal number of rented condo units (from previous records). On another note, this PM has changed ownership/contract several times in the past five years, so I wouldn't be surprised if the data existed at some point, but was lost in transition of ownership at some point.

Thanks, Greg. Challenging them is what I've been doing, and I was actually making some progress with the HOA's PM in determining which owners had secondary homes in the complex. That's a work still in progress.

In the meantime, I started looking to other lenders to see if they send different questionnaires to the HOA. It turns out they do, and and the questions are worded differently! Once I told this to the original lender, his manager talked to their underwriters and they decided to just use the appraisal numbers. We close on the refinance this weekend! A lot of extra time (by me) was spent on this one, but I learned some good lessons. Happy to share more details with others.

It's currently under a VA loan (was my primary), but is now being rented out as an investment property.

Hello BP family,

I am near closing on a substantial cash-out refi with my CA condo (single unit rental). The lender is at a road block with the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac owner occupancy requirement that at least 50% of the project's units must be occupied as primary residences or as second homes.

My conundrum is this: for the underwriter, the appraiser's report does not match up with the property management questionnaire. The appraiser reports says of 90 units, 29 are rentals and 61 are owner-occupied. The PM doesn't provide as accurate of info, only stating that there are 57 of 90 "offsite-mailing addresses." Calling and writing the PM, there answer is a consistent, "we can't provide the number or rentals, only the number of on and off-site mailing addresses." What's crazy is that there a numerous "second homes" in this project where the owners obviously have offsite mailing addresses (Monterey, CA). The HOA president and board refuse to be contacted and only refer me to the PM. The lender has put the ball in my court while shrugging their shoulders.

Any ideas to how I can get an accurate answer to the number of rentals in the project in order to push the ball forward? I've been trying to get a hold of the appraiser to see how they came up with their (more helpful) numbers. One last note: Our HOA CC&Rs do require owners to submit Tenant Occupancy forms to the PM if we rent our units out (i.e., that's the only method of rental data collection I'm aware of, but the PM isn't willing to release those numbers). Thanks BP community!