All Forum Posts by: Jennifer Delmore

We have to register our rental with the city (Garfield Heights).  It's a simple form with contact information and a $100 annual fee.

If you know you want to do real estate you might be better served with a business degree of some sort (finance) as you're going to get into lots of financial analysis to determine good deals vs. bad and more.  The mechanical engineering degree might help you fix stuff, but not the day to day of being a landlord, making deals, or running your own business.  At 20 with no money, I'd focus o.n your education and save what you can so when you're in a position to take action you're ready

In your case I'd probably short sell it ASAP.  We have a 3BR, 2 BA near Cleveland that we bought in 2004  and are still 30-40K upside down, but our tenant pays the mortgage, and property management fees (we moved out of state) and utilities and we clear ~$100/month, so we hang on to it and let our tenant pay down the mortgage.  If we were losing cash every month I don't think we'd still have it.

We pay the mortgage on our rental property with the rents paid by the tenant.  What's the point of having a rental property if it doesn't cover the expenses of the property?

I'm also wondering why you're focused on out of state when I'm sure there are lots of great opportunities within an hour or two of where  you're at.  

Hi!  We are in Denver as well and looking to invest out of state for cash flow.  We have one rental in the Cleveland area (kept as a rental when we relocated to Colorado) but we're not tied to that region for future investments so we are still narrowing down where we want to invest going forward.  Welcome!

We are long distance, so I don't feel like we have a ton of choice in using management but it's totally worth it to us.  If we were local we'd probably use them for tenant placement and do the day-to-day ourselves but my husband is super handy and would be able to fix just about anything.  As it is, we are their first call if there's an issue and for small things we have a friend who can stop by and handle it and we send him a check for materials and treat him and his wife to a nice dinner whenever we are in town :).  When he's not available or it's a bigger issue we pay the PM maintenance rates to resolve things.  They didn't/don't bat an eye at us being the first call for maintenance concerns.  

so you made money on the first, but lost money on the second, or you haven't sold the second yet?

We have a 90 lb dog and she did not damage our oak floors in our old house.  We lived there for 6 years.  The poly was scratched in high traffic areas, but none of the damage went down to the actual wood.  We sanded and poly-d (use a good commercial grade poly to be more forgiving of wear and tear) before we moved out and turned it into a rental.  The pine floors we had upstairs - those had some dents in them from the large dog, but pine is much softer than oak.