All Forum Posts by: Jeff Stein

Welcome to the neighborhood! Do you have certain areas that your are planning to target? I have lived here all my life and happy to answer any questions you have.

Quote from @Guillermo Perez Vargas:

Hi,
For several years I've used Quick-books for my House flipping, Rentals & Note business. Now I've been informed by Intuit desktop version is going away. From what I've read, the on-line version is very bad.
Does anyone have experience with any other accounting package that is reasonably priced and runs out of desktop (not on-line)?
Thank you for your inputs.
Guillermo Perez-Vargas
PV and C Holdings, LLC

 From what I have learned, you can still use your desktop version, but there wil be no further updates released for that version. I currently use the desktop quickbooks and will continue to use for the forseable future.

Investment Info:

Office Space buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $2,237,500

Large office building with a space to create a new co-working office as well.

I have found success providing two offers to tenants for renewal in a situation like yours. I would offer them a 2 year lease with something like a 5-10% rent increase and a 4 year lease with half the rent increase and give them the option to choose. If they are a good office tenant that pays on time and does not cause you any problems it is worth trying to keep them for longer rather than the few % extra cash flow you can squeeze out of them. 

The other way you can do is just offer them a 4 year lease with 2-3% yearly rent increases, but you need to make sure you have a good way of keeping track of the rent increases and adding them appropriately.

To start out with, I would not recommend going with your #2 option unless you are also planning on doing the management of the properties yourself. Although the platforms like Buildium have accounting functionalities, they are really not as useful if you are only wanting to keep track of your books.

The cheapest way would be to create an excel sheet and enter each buildings P&L. Quickbooks has a product called desktop Premier. You can enter in each buildings monthly P&L as a separate "class" (think of it like a different division of your overall business that owns all the properties) which should take about 15 mins per building per month since you can do it on one sheet as a general ledger entry. Hopefully this helps answer your question. Could you elaborate why you are linking your bank accounts? I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

I would recommend you start with what your goals are for the company and yourself vs where you are today. This will give you  a much better frame work of how you need to invest, market and structure a business to get you from A to B.

The structure of the business is very dependent on what the business does and wants to accomplish. Real estate properties are best held in an LLC rather then a C-corp. or S-corp. When it comes to employees vs contractors I attached the governments definition below.

https://www.acf.hhs.gov/css/tr...

Looks like you have a great space with a lot of potential. I may be a little biased since I mostly deal in office buildings, but you could think about a co-working office space. There is a little more work and management involved, but it has a high cash flow potential. I am currently working on a space that occupies about $10,300 in Wisconsin.

@James Storey is correct that the type of deal and the bank you are working with determine the down payment required. I purchase office building and would say 25%-30% is typical, but my most recent was 20% down.

@Daniel Scruggs

I used to use cozy.co which was a great free platform as someone else mentioned. It is now apartments.com owned, but I have not tried it since it switched over. I have been using Buildium. I mostly manage commercial spaces which it does not do perfectly, but overall I really like the system. Financially I don’t think it starts to make sense until you are in the 15+ units because 0-50 units is the same price.