All Forum Posts by: Christian Malesic

We do try hard to keep the advertising limited to just the banners and not in the posts. Once in a while, someone will slip something thru on us for a few hours. If you ever see that, click on "report abuse" and let us know.

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Risk and reward are tightly linked. The higher the risk, the higher the "potential" for reward, which also means the higher the potential for loss.

If you want a super safe investment, put your money in your local savings account. Risk is super low, so reward is as well (usually at 0.25% in this market).

It sounds like you will fit in nicely here. You might want to start with uploading a photo or picture to reprent yourself.

We are gald you found us. Dig into the site. We are making great improvements on a weekly basis.

Thanks for coming on board. It is good to have you.

I beleive the general answer is "small, maybe medium." There is very little a large accounting firm can do for REIs that a small one can't (EXCEPT charge large fees, of course).

We dealt with a larger firm at one point and ended up leaving them for a small firm. REIs look after our dollars very closely. The large firm mentality doesn't seem to think that way.

Both. Two Letters. Most attorneys would recommend this for all official documents. One is to sign for receipt (certified) the other is to prove that it is a real address and they are still receiving mail there (regular mail). IOW, if you get the certified mail piece back that only means it is a bad address if YOU ALSO get the regular mail piece back. That is the legal thinking.

The Section 8 payments ARE NOT above market at all.

In our area, that is not permissable, though their are those that do it. We advertise normally at the market rate. If we receive a Section 8 applicant, we consider them fairly. We often DO NOT get Section 8 applicants, but those we have are good tenants.

We generally post the Pay Rent or Quit Notice on about the 15th. We file for eviction then a few days later, depending on how the weekend falls. Our notice, and our lease, gives them 3 days to cure once the notice is posted before we go to the judge.

We have often thought of speeding the process and doing it sooner. It is difficult and almost impractical for us. We are 4 people all with full times jobs that do our RE business in off hours. We separate the RE responsibilities By the time we make it to the post office, process the deposits in Quick Books, contact our partner (the PM), she calls to see if we can squeeze some money out of the tenat for their legal obligations, drive to the property to post, etc. This takes about 2 weeks.

It is a monthly ritual. Now, we have 30+ rental untis, so those of you with 2 or 3 can't use this excuse.

We recently learned a tough lesson. I provide the basics here so you do not have to go to the school of hard knocks as did we. You can go to BP school.

In our area, once Section 8 does a walkthru inspection, the report becomes law. I would imagine this is universal throughout the country, but since Section 8 is run at the local level, I am not sure.

We got written up for a torn screen (window) in the winter. It wasn't trashed, just had a tear in it. We dragged our butt and eventually got it repaired. Then we dragged our butt getting the form into Sec 8 saying it was repaired. We missed the deadline on the form, thinking our ‘real’ deadline was to have the screen repaired by Spring as the job of a window screen is to keep bugs out when the window is open (but since when do you apply logic when talking about the government).

They held 2 months of rent based on ‘faulty property’. Unfortunate, but understandable, we thought. This is to ensure we actually DO get the screen repaired. The first month we just thought there was an accounting irregularity or admin mistake. We honestly never associated the screen repair with the payment. It didn’t even occur to us. Plus, payment was on the accounting side and screen repair on the maintenance side. These people talk in our company (we are all family and some of us live together), but again, it never occurred to us that WE NEEDED TO TALK. By the time someone actually returned our calls at Sec 8, the beginning of the next month had come and gone and we had the 2nd month’s payment held.

It turned out that ‘held’ was a bad choice of words on their part as (to me at least) it implies that we will get it paid at some later date. ‘Lost’ would have been a better choice of words. We failed to earn almost $500 in rent for a 6†tear in a screen that cost $15 to replace. We tried fighting to no avail.

Dumb mistake on our part - who would have thunk it?

Our new company policy is to treat those repair reports like GOLD. Everyone in the company has been briefed on the importance. We have every intention of not making the same mistake twice.

Hopefully, this thread will keep you from making the mistake the first time.

By the book, yes.

An LLC is a LEGAL entity, meaning it is like a person without physical form. Thus, if the LLC is the owner and you are the tenant, you would need to pay the LCC rent.