All Forum Posts by: Jesse Kreun

@Alan Zee

No-  we sold out of Cincinnati.  I had tried researching PMs in the area several times and no one seemed to have good recommendations, so we just decided to cut our losses and move on. 

Hi, James. Just saw your post. I know it's five years since you posted- did you ever buy any? How did it turn out for you?

We invested in Cincinnati for a while and could not find good property management companies to work with.  We have an 11 unit apartment and a 24 unit.  We tried both RAW property management and Paradigm Property management.  Would not recommend either of them.  We were not able to find any other good alternates we were comfortable with, so ended up selling and getting out of the area.  When I had looked at all the forums before, it seemed that Cincinnati has a shortage of any good managers. 

Yes, that is correct.  I've heard that Condo liens take first place - even above tax liens, but I can't find anything official to back that up or find out how to get involved if that is true.  

Does anyone have any experience with Condo liens in Washington state? Specifically looking for Redmond, Kirkland, or Bellevue information. Can you point me to any resources? 

I used Paradigm Property Management in Cincinnati and it was not a good experience.  Feel free to reach out to me for more information, but in short, they were terrible with communication, had vacancies that lasted way too long without good reasons given, and didn't answer direct questions about some of their expenses.  We ended up losing quite a bit of money with them before moving on.  

@Christian Rojmar - Thank you so much for the advice!  I think I should be able to do a lot of the work myself -  like you said it just takes time.  I have the raw data in excel and am pretty good with excel, so maybe that will speed it up a little.  I can hopefully see if anything looks shady and if it starts looking "off", I can then hire a professional to redo some of the work or help me out.  

Thank you @Daniel Hyman.  As you say, I may be able to figure it out myself.  Now it's just a matter of finding the time.  :/

Does anyone have any experience with Forensic Accounting or had to do it on a property? I, unfortunately, need to go back in time to see if a property manager I was using was stealing from me or doing anything shady.  Is this something that any accountant can do? Or a specialist of some sort?

Hi all - 

I need some help!  My wife and I are real estate investors - we own three properties and none of them are living up to our expectations.  We have been putting a ton of our own money into the properties to keep them going, but at this point there is no more money to keep them afloat, so we need answers.   The only option we can see is to sell them all, but I wanted to post on here to see if there was any advice or options that we haven't thought of yet.  We do not want to make an emotional decision, but we seem to be painted into a corner with our finances.  

Property 1: 4plex (the best performing property we have).  Generally gives us a few hundred dollars per month after paying the mortgage, but we have probably about $100k in equity at this point.  We could refi and get some of the cash out, but that would remove any of the cashflow we have currently, which doesn't seem to make sense. 

Property 2: 24 unit apartment complex.  The numbers when we purchased look good, but we are still not realizing the profit we expected and the expenses seem so high each month.  The managers keep telling us that we'll get to the profit soon, but month after month is doesn't materialize.  I don't believe they are scamming us, but yet we continue to have to dig into our own pockets to cover part of the mortgage. If we sell, there is a little bit of equity here, but not a ton.

Property 3: Hardest property we own. 11 unit apartment complex.  Again - the numbers looked good when we purchased, but again- after years of owning it, it is still not performing and we rarely get any money from the property to even pay the mortgage out of, so it is ALL coming out of our pocket!  We just got rid of a bad tenant and the managers say the property is stabilizing, but it could be a few months yet before we start getting paid.  If we sell, there is a little bit of equity here, but not a ton.

So question-  would you sell one? All?  Any other options that you can think of? What kind of professional can give us advice on this? We are talking to a financial planner this week, but of course they are going to be more interested in selling us on stocks, etc.

Thanks, all!