All Forum Posts by: Ian S.

We're considering buying SFH rentals in Atlanta. We're out of state, so we'll need property management. We own several buy and hold SFHs in Charlotte and work with someone who's both a realtor and a PM. That's worked really well for us and we'd ideally like to find someone like that in Atlanta. Does anyone have any suggestions? Or suggestions for fabulous PM plus a great investor-friendly realtor? Thanks!

Maybe you could start by house hacking to both get your feet wet and cut down on housing costs?  It sounds like your major could be both lucrative and exciting.  I'm sure there's opportunities outside of lab work and you're already 2 years and $40K invested.  Why not see it through while you explore real estate?  W-2 income is seriously helpful when applying for loans.

Thanks for the opinions all.  You've given my wife and I much to think about,  The tenant in question was inherited with the property, and did not go through any of the vetting our PM would normally do.   We're not sure of their ability to ever pay back.

I'm surprised about the strong reactions here against cash for keys - I'd heard so many positive things (including on blog posts here).   In our case, we were thinking of using it as a "proactive" means of replacing a potentially problematic tenant (in a newly acquired property) that we hadn't vetted with one we had.

Hi!

First time post. Looking for some advice from the community. One of the properties we recently purchased in Charlotte, NC had a problematic tenant. We knew he was problematic going into the deal, and it only took 2 months before he stopped paying and we had grounds to have our PM evict him. On the way out, he took the range, did some damage (about $1000 worth) and also owes us about $1000 in back rent. Of course he didn’t leave a forwarding address. Our PM says to have any chance of getting any of this money back (probably total $2-3k) we could hire a private investigator to track him down (about $150) and sue him (lawyer fees about $200). But, he didn’t hold out much hope that we’d ever see a penny - all that it would do is guarantee this guy would always have a hard time renting any property ever again.

Should we do this? Or we are throwing good money after bad?

(And yes, we should have done cash-for-keys.. next time!)

Thanks!

Ian