All Forum Posts by: Jerry Kaidor

I use Ringcentral. It's not cheap - costs me about a grand a year, but it has every feature a child could want. And in the big picture, the grand is a nit. It gives me a 888 number which I use for all my properties. It enforces hours of operation, so we can sleep at night. It has a queue of phones it calls - first it calls my cell phone, then my wife's cell phone, then our home phone. "We can run, but we can't hide". One of the things I stress with prospective tenants is that they can pick up the phone and get the owner at the other end of the line.

It also has incoming and outgoing fax. I have incoming fax set up so they are emailed to me as TIFF files. An incoming filter on my Linux server sees that there is a tiff attachment, and unpacks them into the directory I use for my fax in basket.

It does support multiple extensions, but I am not using them yet.

- Jerry Kaidor

Ahh, leaks from upstairs bathrooms - Here's some of the common causes I've encountered:

* Supply side leak from the mixer valve - water would be coming down all the time.
* drain overflow not properly sealed to tub
* drain shoe not properly sealed to tub
* leaking supply or drain pipes
* Children splashing when they bathe. "Fix" is to install a tub door. No matter how well you caulk the edges of the bathroom floor, it's not a fish tank. Standing water will find a way down.
* Tub not properly caulked.
* Tub not properly LEVELED. If the tub is tilted down toward its head,
water will gather on the top lip, where it touches the tile or surround. And that water WILL find its way into the wall, no matter how enthusiastically you caulk. The average steel tub does have a lip that curls up under the tile - HOWEVER, there is a gap at each end of the lip. So the tub MUST be tilted the other way - down towards the foot. Test is to pour some water on the head lip and see if it stays. If you have any more than a film of water remaining, you have a tilt problem.

As others have said, the cosmetic drywall repairs are trivial - the real cost is in that upstairs bath.

- Jerry Kaidor

I use my own software that I wrote over the past 5 years. It's written as a secure website. The backend is in Perl, it uses the mysql database, and unix tools such as netPBM and LaTex to assemble PDF documents.

It also does tenant ledgers, generates 3-day notices,
organizes the process of checking prospective tenants and moving them in, and tracks maintenance. It generates 16-page rental agreements. It has a system of multiple users and permissions, and I have been able to give my local managers access to book incoming rents. Best thing I ever did - they're doing a much better job at it than I was doing. And they enjoy it. It gives them a feeling of control and power when they can tell tenants exactly what they owe and why - rather than telling them to call me.

It all started out with the tenant ledgers. I used to keep them on paper - 8x11 sheets ruled to look like check ledgers. Rents would come in, I'd scribble them in the ledger sheets - whoops, ran out of space in this one! Let's see if we can get just one more payment into the margin! One day, I thought "Gee, I bet the computer could do a good job at this".

I am presently working on modules to do bank deposits and payroll. My staff suffers putting together a big deposit, all on paper - they add it up multiple times - Here, you check my total - why is yours different? - I think I can make it pretty trivial for them. And oh - why not stick the payments in the tenants ledgers while we're at it? Another thing is payroll - right now that takes me a whole day. I think I could slim it down to an hour by having people enter their own timesheets and workorders.

It's taken a lot of time; there's probably a hundred thousand lines of Perl. But it's a lot more fun than doing donkey work. And I honestly think I've had a net time
savings.

The maintenance module has been very helpful during evictions: the tenant cries "Uninhabitability!" and I show up in court with a printout that shows everything that's been done in that apartment for the past few years, and handwritten workorders supporting the printout. Haven't lost one yet...

- Jerry Kaidor

*** Hey, me too! I did software development for 20 years and screwed up my hands royally. So I started buying apartment buildings....

- Jerry Kaidor