All Forum Posts by: Giovanni Isaksen

I would add growing population and job growth to @Joel Owens' list too.

Good hunting-

@Abou C.  Great question, whole books or series of books could/have been written on the subject. There also have been a number of detailed discussions on here about apartment due diligence, if you search on those three words (in the far upper right corner of this page) a long list of those discussions will come up. Would be happy to answer any specific questions you have.

Good hunting-

@Account Closed  Thanks for sharing about the motel style units, we're thinking about them as well. Couple of questions: Are they hard wired or do they plug into an outlet? What would did they cost all in, including carpentry, wiring, etc.?

@Jeff Zhou  in many jurisdictions violations can be found online at the building department's website. A number of them now combine fire code violations along with building code violations so they can all be found in one location. In some places there are 'livability' code issues that are also posted online.

A standard part of our preliminary market research is to determine what information can be found online at which website. Usually a phone call to the different departments will help uncover the correct locations if the information is not posted in an obvious place.

Good hunting-

I really like @Nazz Wang idea of free internet, it could really help working class tenants and make it easier for our property managers to serve their residents... and collect rent online too.

@Marcia Maynard  put me on your waiting list too! :) I really like your garden idea and have heard from others that it really helps with retention. One of our clients has a property that's perfect for one but haven't been able to convince them that it's worth the effort (actually the management companies effort). Any advice?

Thanks all, great ideas.

+1 on @Chris Winterhalter comments.

Another thing that should be considered is the impact on tenants during construction. This is an issue our clients pay very close attention to when renovating any kind of building with tenants. Even the tenants who are in units not being worked on will be affected; dust, noise, parking, utility outages, etc. And remember contractors are optimists, projects rarely complete on schedule. Undiscovered issues, material availability, labor shortages and worst of all changes* in the design or the scope after construction is underway are things that through no fault of their own cause contractors to miss deadlines.

*At the construction company I owned I would tell customers that there are four main levels of cost in construction, each a magnitude of cost higher than the preceding level:

1. 1. Manufactured; built in a factory and shipped to the site.
2. 2. Production; where hundreds of similar buildings are built at a single site.
3. 3. One-of-a-kind (used to be called custom but that term has been co-opted by production builders); building something that's never been built before... and
4. 4. By Change Order.

I think you meant to say the occupancy rate is 94-95% right? The rental market there isn't 95% vacant is it?

What's a good cap rate for a zeeloporp? ;)

Thanks all for adding the alert for Zeeloporp :) I just added it to my spellcheck and now I'm off to add the alert for it!

Cool! Now if only a consensus could be reached about what a multifamily property is keyword alerts will be really useful. In the CRE investing world multifamily is 5+ units but on here anybody with a plex seems to call their property a multifamily.

To be professional and help raise everyone's game we should use the industry standard terminology but personally I don't care if we call a 5+ property a zeeloporp, as long as there's a keyword that won't fill my inbox with plexes.

Brandon, help a WA brother out!

Thanks,

Giovanni