All Forum Posts by: Jerrad Shepherd

@Winter Heintz

I love to use Marketplace as well, just curious what your prescreen is? I typically post in my ad that any interested parties will need to message me their email address. Then once they message me they typically ask “is this is still available” which is a canned response to my ad. Then I copy and paste this back to them.

“Yes, it is still available. If you give me your email address I can email over an app. Once I get the app back I can then let you know if/when I am planning to show it next. To qualify for rental income needs to exceed rent by atleast 3x, no violent felonies or evictions in the last 7 years, and no large pets.”

Once I get one or 2 good apps back I setup a mass showing of the property and invite any of the people who messaged me that have not yet gotten me an app back yet. I typically give preference to the people who get apps back to me first but I still want a whole crowd of people to look at the property to encourage competition and also so I can meet new qualified applicants for future properties that come open. I typically have 4-5 openings per month.

@Patrick Crehan

I wonder if these will be the next loans to be forgiven?

@Robert Glover

We own an RV park in central Nebraska with 108 Rv spots and around 50 primitive spots on a 35 acre parcel around a 10 acre pond. I wouldn’t want to own one much smaller than ours, there are definitely economies of scale for such a business unless you are planning to run it remotely which sounds like a real headache to me.

@Gary L Wallman

I would have to agree with this statement. Also, the less money they have the more or larger the dogs as well.

@Matthew Crivelli

I actually have close to 60 doors total in 5 different towns, so it’s not like it’s a small case study…. Prices are up and tenant quality is down.

It’s crazy to me how many potential tenants have aggressive breed dogs. I would estimate that a good 25% of the people that contact me any given month about a property have a Pitbull or multiple. They are shocked when I tell them that I cannot allow them in my units. It’s crazy to me that a large percentage of the population choosing to rent would have such a liability that would limit their choices on housing. Yet I know very few people who own their own homes that have aggressive breed dogs when they don’t have the limitations holding them back. I have noticed the same about smokers as well.

@Barry Hickson have you considered turning it into RV storage?

@Jerrad Shepherd

Sorry about the poem format, it didn’t exactly copy and paste the way I had hoped. I haven’t had my morning pot of coffee as of yet.

Haha, I actually sat down and wrote a poem about life as a landlord. Before we started building our portfolio the wife and I had a several discussions about worst case scenario type stuff. I told her that eventually we will have a tenant die in a unit, we may end up getting death threats, some of our units will get destroyed, we will have a hard time collecting rent sometimes, we will need to evict tenants and some may actually be good people who are just down on their luck. We have had some of these things happen to us but nothing as bad as what we prepared ourselves for. I like to be pessimistic in my numbers and my short term outlook but I am very optimistic in the process and the future we are building. No regrets here after 8 LONG years of being a landlord/small business owner. At least the issues I deal with are my issues that I can handle how I see fit vs working for the man and following someone else’s lead…

I am blessed to be bored,

living life as a landlord.

Business is grand when everything’s slow, no better time to be saving my dough.

No shortage of stunning problems to face, still way better than running the rat-race.

Meeting some applicants at the units I show,

leaves me shaking my head like ah hell no!

Wondering when I will get paid all my rent, then the sob stories all the money got spent.

Trying like mad to elude any feud,

Too many thoughts include being sued.

Constantly looking for that next deal to buy,

then getting outbid like a poke in the eye.

Hours and hours of work on my phone, talking to people but feeling alone.

But when things start to feel sour,

I just think of the dollars per hour.

@Jim Kalish

I make it a habit to drink beer and fish most days 🤷‍♂️. There is nothing saying that you have to stay productive. When I get bored with the level of success that I am currently enjoying I may go looking for more headaches, really doubting I get bored of fishing and beer drinking though…. After all this is the reason why I hustled in the first place.