All Forum Posts by: Chad Hale

@David Nunn  No, you don't want to participate in that scheme.

It's illegal and considered fraud. 

Also, do you want that kind of a tenant,  doesn't want to follow rules and is willing to lie?

How do you think they are going to treat you and your property?

@Miquel Julia Househacking is a great idea in the bay area.  Commute traffic is interesting in the bay area.  Physical distance (miles away) is not the only measurement.  Best to look at your work address and then monitor commute times from different areas and at different times of the day.  Agreed with @Wilson Lau commuting from Morgan Hill is tough. That's almost 30 minutes to Mountain View with no traffic.

Check what your current lease says about renewals.

Most / a lot of commercial leases have language about determining the rent rate for the next term.  IE they won't say what the rent rate is but how it is determined.   Negotiated, market rate, mediator to decide etc ...

I'm assuming they are not currently on the lease or living there.

Treat them like a completely new prospect.  Full application and all associated checks. If they pass, sign a new unrelated lease.

The number of longer term renters looking for a furnished home is a much smaller pool of people.  Being furnished is also extra work, more things to break and be maintained. I will no longer manage furnished long term rentals.  Connecting with an insurance company may be helpful in placing long term tenants in a fully furnished home.  

Doing STR is a completely different game.

Quote from @Justin R.:

Quote from @Chad Hale:

I used QB when first starting my property management business. I moved to Rent Manager (RM) several years ago and couldn't be happier about leaving QB.  I do all accounting for properties and company in Rent Manager.  RM is plenty robust to handle the items you mentioned.  At the time QB was not the best for property management. You could use it but had to do a lot of work a rounds.

I used CSV's to import data that I needed into RM.  So happy to not being using QB.
Most accountants probably won't know PM software, but there are some that do.

 What's your thoughts on using Rent Manager for an investor that already has professional property management? Is it overkill as I would not be dealing with leases, work orders, etc?

How do you share your accounting from the software to your Accountant?

Your property manager should be supplying monthly reports and year end PnL reports that you give directly to your CPA.  Should not be that much work even if having to do manual entry.  CPA could also import a csv?

Yes, Rent Manager is overkill if you have outside/professional property management. RM (and most other good management software) does double entry accounting, imports bank info, has reconciling functions etc.

I used QB when first starting my property management business. I moved to Rent Manager (RM) several years ago and couldn't be happier about leaving QB.  I do all accounting for properties and company in Rent Manager.  RM is plenty robust to handle the items you mentioned.  At the time QB was not the best for property management. You could use it but had to do a lot of work a rounds.

I used CSV's to import data that I needed into RM.  So happy to not being using QB.
Most accountants probably won't know PM software, but there are some that do.

As others said, your lease should address who is responsible and how issues should be communicated to the landlord.  It sounds like your actions were timely?  A conversation with them followed up with an email summarizing that conversation is a good place to start.  They may simply want to be heard and have the issue addressed?  You do want the issue fixed, including blocking any entry points.  Rats and other critters (opossums, raccoons, mice etc) are very common in San Jose.

Make the start date of the lease contingent and effective upon closing.  Put an end date to this as well in case the closing date pushes out which could change things.

You are starting a business.  It's a grind.  One thing that is different from other businesses is that there are no days off.  Things break and issues occur every day of the week, uplanned.  Putting in place policies and systems to handle that will be key otherwise you'll always be working or at least be on-call.  
If you love property management and want to start a business keep looking into it.
Otherwise keep buying income producing properties to generate wealth.