All Forum Posts by: Jill Iwanski

Make sure to check your area fire codes. Might need to be a fire rated door. Even if there is no code I would think you would want a fire rated door.

We have hit the mark in 4 years acquiring 58 units with 8 units currently under contract which will put us at 66 units. The goal is 100 units total in the next 2 years. We are FI but continue to work our W2 jobs.

@Joe S.we use furnishfinder.com. It costs $99/year. They post the apartment. They also vet all the tenants and also the landlord. It has work great. Been using it for 2 years now. The applicant also uses it to contact us with email. We are currently getting $575/month for a 550 sf studio apartment. We spent about $2500 to fully furnish it and scheduled to get our money back in 3 years. We cover all the utilities and high speed internet. It has been a great use of the space that would otherwise be basically unrentable.

We have a studio apartment that we rent to traveling nurses. They stay for 13 weeks at a time. It works great for us. It is more work having to flip every 13 weeks but it’s worth it. We have had nothing but great nurses rent from us. They are there to work mega hours and most of them travel home for the weekends. Apartment is fully furnished and all utilities are included in the rent. They show up with a suitcase and enjoy the apartment.

We had a similar problem last thanksgiving. We had a unit that got mold in the carpet from a leaky water heater. The tenant needed to vacate the apartment for 2.5 weeks to have all the carpet removed, air scrubbed, and all new flooring installed. We moved the tenant into an empty apartment in the same complex. Our kids and us went to her apartment armed with 50 rubber-made totes, packed her entire apartment, hired movers to load everything into 2 enclosed trailers and whatever belonging she wanted to take to the temp apartment (at our cost), set her up in the temp apartment, helped her transfer her cable and internet and made sure she was completely comfortable (because of covid he didn’t feel comfortable going to a hotel that we offer to pay for). Once everything was done and we passed the mold tests we returned to move her and her belongings back. We covered every expense and refunded her November rent (which she tried to pay multiple times). Nothing that happened was her fault in any way and we were more then happy to give up 2 Sunday’s worth of time to help her out. She is a very happy tenant that will never move because of the efforts we made to make a bad situation the best it could be. I believe your landlord is doing the best she can do to make everything right. That should stand for something. May people just wouldn’t care about you.

We have created about 8 SOP’s in the last 1.5 years. They are extremely helpful for all tasks. Some SOP’s are step by step instructions to complete a task like screening a prospective tenant. Others are simple checklists to make sure nothing is missed like a checklist for flipping an apartment. SOP’s come in many shapes and forms and we highly recommend them.

We require everybody to fill out a pre-application in order to schedule a showing. It’s just a form on our website that we made up. Doesn’t ask for major details like SS number. It gives us a chance to Facebook them and see what kind of people we are meeting at the showing. If they like what they see and we like them we offer them a chance to fill out the rental application. What we have learned over the last 4 years of using the pre-application is that the people that won’t fill it out you don’t want as tenants anyway and we don’t waste our time showing the unit. The people that are willing to fill out the pre-application almost always follow up with a rental application and are qualified to rent from us. We maintain very strict criteria and have had great success using it.

We run quicken to keep track of the operating account and capex savings accounts. All rent is deposited in the operating account. Then we maintain a savings account for each property. Once a month we move money from our operating account to the capex savings accounts (set up as auto transfers). We transfer $300/door/year divided up monthly, also property taxes and property insurance yearly divided up monthly. We also set up quicken to auto record the transfers so there is no work for us except to reconcile the accounts monthly. All repairs and bills are paid out of the operating account. The capex reserve savings accounts are for exactly that, capex. Quicken is cheaper and easier to run then quick books and gives you the ability to run all the needed reports on any given property. We started out using spreadsheets but they are cumbersome and didnt scale easily. They work great for a few small properties but if you plan to scale they will prove limiting.

Social security is paid twice a month. Some people are paid on the 3rd and others are paid on the 15th. I’m not sure how the feds decide who is paid when but we have tenants that get paid on the 15th. Our history shows that tenants that get paid on the 3rd will always pay rent on the 4th and the tenants that get paid on the 15th will pay rent by the 1st. We don’t collect rent until the 5th of the month and anybody that pays by the 5th is considered to be paid on time. Once we realized how the feds work and how tenants pay our life got a lot easier not expecting rent on the 1st. We just slid our systems 4 days to expect rent on the 5th. We even went as far as to move all our mortgage payments to after the 10th of the month to ensure the cash was in the bank. You’ll just need to figure out what works for you and your tenants.

If they are receiving government payments then they receive a pay raise every year. Look up COLA and base your rent increases on the amount of a pay raise they receive. We specialize in 55 and older so most of our tenants live on social security. The COLA for 2021 is 1.6%. If you max out that every year it won’t take long to get the units up to market rents.