All Forum Posts by: Dan Moore

 The Raleigh meetup seems pretty active. TREIA also so, but they meet on a night where I cannot attend so I cannot personally say how they are. I hear good things. 

Another Raleigh person. Very nice. I will give you a follow on Instagram. 

@Jacob Walls lots of good replies but one thing I haven't seen mentioned is to keep it short. Starting and running the LLC is relatively painless, but there will be a time where you are getting sued, or shuttering the business, or something like that. At some point you will have to sign a lot of docs.

Dan Moore

Managing Member

NCF Residential LLC

Is a lot easier to hand write 20 times than

Dan Moore

Managing Member

Just Down the Street Really Cool Rental Properties LLC

I did like the story about the salesmen calling for the baby that was napping, that the LLC was named after. We have a phone line for our entrance gate access. To establish the phone line we had to put someone's name on it. Phone company wouldn't budge on it. So I gave them my dog Hannah's name. You wouldn't believe the crap I get for Hannah. I guess since she pays her bills so routinely she has good credit. Sure makes it easy to sort the trash from the mail.

Clint, I can introduce you to my bank. They are offering to do similar loans for me and they have a branch in Wilmington. They are a local community bank but a fairly large one. They do portfolio loans. Shoot me a text and I'll send you the contact info. 

Are they late because they are broke, or late because they just can't manage money? If they are broke, then I'm leery of keeping them, late fees or not. However, if they are just people who cannot manage money, then I'd set them up on Cozy or something similar. Automatically scheduled payments, they can pay with their credit card if they want, and if there are late the late fees are automatically billed vs having to work them out with the tenant. 

You didn't say how you were collecting the rent but it sounded like maybe you are collecting manually so just adding in that option for automatic payment. Not everyone who is late is broke. 

If an automatic payment system gets them on time, then you have a perfect tenant. If it doesn't, then you have automatic extra money collection. Either way, you get rid of the hassle. Again, assuming you are picking up checks now. 

@Clint Harris Nothing now, but we are always looking for purchases. And the wife is always on me to purchase a place at the beach. She prefers Myrtle Beach but your area is more my speed. I'll PM you our contact info in case you come onto something that makes sense. 

Awesome story. When you are ready for your third house let me know. 

My first job was establishing credit for businesses applying for in house credit accounts. You are correct, normally we would require at least 3 trade references. The gas company (gasoline for their fleet vehicles), a uniform vendor, that kind of thing. Whatever they offered as a reference. 

Back in the day you could actually call and talk to people and get good details, but now I believe most of them will require you to send a form over for them to fill out, and they MAY fill it out and send it back. They will REQUIRE a signed release by the applying company saying that the applicant authorizes the release of their credit information. It's fairly generic and you could make it up in a few minutes. 

Even with the release in hand, they may barely fill it out. They are under no obligation to do so. It just depends on how generous the reference is with their time that day.  

Usually what you are asking for is the credit terms that they have with the vendor. 10 day, 30 day, 90 day? Total credit limit. What their average and/or high balance is. And most importantly, how many times have they been late and how long. Your form you will send them will have blanks for all these items. Also have they had to do any collections (beyond in house). This would be yes/no.

There is nothing magical about asking a business vs asking a previous landlord. In fact, if this is a company who is doing this routinely, I'd ask for their other landlords they've done business with as their trade references. That will be a better reference than the gas company. My experience was they ALWAYS paid the gas company because they couldn't shut the fleet down. But they'd stiff you in a heartbeat because what are you gonna do about it? Get huffy? Businesses are really good at ignoring small time vendors and paying when and if they feel like it. However, they generally do pay better than people because you are dealing with a professional, as in there is an accounts payable person whose job it is to make sure AP gets done on time and deal with the calls when it isn't. Just hope the AP person isn't the owners wife. That was usually 90% of the problem when I had a problem in collections. (I also did the collections and field collections if it went really bad.) I'd show up to get our money and the wife, who'd been avoiding me and/or telling me they didn't have the money for 90-180 days, would have a brand new car in the driveway. 

As far as getting paid, I'd rent to a company before I'd rent to an individual. I just need to know the company, which you are finding out. 

Welcome back to NC. I was actually just flying for the Army yesterday in Lumberton at KLBT. The Waffle House had a surprisingly good breakfast. I attended my first meetup in Raleigh this month and was quite pleased with the quality and quantity of people there. I'd definitely suggest attending one. There are also a number of REI meetups in Raleigh on Meetup.com. I have not attended any of those but do intend to. If we can hit the same meetup, first beer is on me to thank you for your time as one of Uncle Sams misguided children.

Had a couple apply. Early 60s. Not married. Similar story for why they were renting. Pulled up in a shiny new Dodge. VERY similar credit file. Eerily similar to your description. Very little history. What there was was not good but petty stuff easily explained. 

Seemed ok in the walk through. Because something was fishy and the credit file was so short I called in a favor and had a criminal background check run. A real one. Instead of the weak public file we see, I got back about 10 pages of wants and warrants for failure to appear, failure to pay registration, false identities, etc. Girlfriend was the worst of it but the guy was no angel. 

Gave them a curt no on their application and they proceeded to argue and plead through multiple conversations that they should be rented to. Held firm and they went away. 

They were living under aliases, which explained the short credit file. They were scam artists.

If you can talk to someone who knew there 15 years ago and verify their ID and corroborate their pay for everything in cash lifestyle, then you can make a decision after lots of diligence. I have seen people like that. But if you have other qualified applicants I’d move on.