All Forum Posts by: Jim Goebel

We have a rental property where a tenant just up and moved out.  We have an onsite property manager and there was no notice given to either him or to me.  The tenant has a bit of a combative personality and seems to have trouble navigating resolving conflict - at first, I was thinking to offer him some percentage of his deposit back right away, or wait for some period of time to evaluate the impact of the vacancy and inability to market the place.  I'm looking for some legal perspective with regards to how much of the deposit would be defensible to withhold?

Thanks much for any thoughts or advice!

Just posted this CL Ad.... :) No doubt it will get flagged soon...

What we're looking for is:

A fully unreliable person. Someone who has made a series of bad life decisions. Whether or not you have a car, it's great when you don't show up when you say you are going to.

We love smokers, but we especially love it when you throw your cigarette butts everywhere. Smoking on the job is encouraged, as a matter of fact, we would prefer that you spend a very large percentage of your time that you are to be 'working' standing outside for a smoke break. We also like people that steal stuff. Very much, actually. We love it when you barely do any work, too.

We really value people that are able to present themselves as having vast, broad experience, but when actually performing work, haven't done much of anything, and display the behavior above.

Oh, I forgot one - we really love it when you entangle your personal life into your work. In whatever form - it's always different but amazing how people can display their awesome creativity. We don't care if you make up stuff or if your life is so wonderful that it really happens!

We love people who blame previous workers' bad quality for any lack of productivity / quality issues.

We love it when you talk to other people/workers about trivial/non productive issues while on the job.

We absolutely adore/love it when you leave your trash everywhere on the jobsite.

We love it also when you try to hook up with other people that are working.

Drinking is highly encouraged on the job.

Tattoos everywhere, including on your forehead - very cool.

Responses with as little thought and consideration as possible, are preferred.

We like people that expect to get paid cash daily, and insist that we drop everything to do it. We love the profile of the person who is trying to get paid cash because they want to hide payments from other obligations such as a negative judgement or child support payments.

Thanks for the feedback.  I'm about to post another couple CL ads (gulp) and will take some of the advice to heart.  I'm going to post info that we do drug screen, do a background check, and check references.  I guess the idea there as much as anything is to determine if people are willing to go through that, and if they are they probably have little/nothing to hide, or are mentally in the right place.

@Devin, I'm not trying to be rude/denigrate, but there's gotta be a middle ground.  Sure, there's a learning curve to carpentry, but after my 2 years of working on these things, I can hold my own just fine with all the rough and finish carpentry that needs to be done.  That's not even counting any specialized education/etc (IE I'm an electrical engineer etc) - point being, someone with a reasonably keen mind and can use a tape measure, stay busy, and use various saws, is a carpenter.  If I had an ultra productive person who I can count on for things like carpentry or drywall, I'd pay them at $15-20/hour and keep them busy.

Part of the big problem, though, is that there's no 'easy' way to determine if I can count on someone and if they REALLY have the skill-set.  There's a lot of people that run around talking the talk.  When you observe their work - it just as often sucks.  With regards to licensing/union 'ladders' - perhaps there's a correlation there between achievement of (for instance) journeyman or years in a union - however even if that was true - there doesn't appear to be correlation between the 'other' important things - caring a little, not drinking on the job, not stealing stuff, etc.

I don't know.

I'm also interested in this - we own rentals so I have functionally been the foreman on the projects/houses we have completed.  Suffice it to say, we have struggled endlessly it seems to try to find that 'right person' who can truly take over/lead a project successfully from start to finish.  This is primarily for residential real estate projects.  The lack of attention to detail is one thing that has cropped up time and again, but also the reliability factor, and principal-agent issues (ie: our person doesn't care as much as we do and doesn't document their work, etc).  I suppose this is a 'foundational' problem as for us, we will have a hard time scaling our business unless we figure this out.

So, we have been operating out of Des Moines IA for a little while and we seem to be having continual challenges with finding good help.  I realize most businesses have this challenge - however it is very acute right now.  Some of these issues include:

• lack of reliability
• cost of poor quality (workmanship)
• theft and site security

We are currently primarily linking up with individuals off of Craigslist - and I'm getting more and more concerned that a reasonably large % of workers (ie: more than say, 20%) that come along looking for work and are willing to work for $10/hr, are really just casing a job site for tools to steal.  We've talked about cameras, an on-boarding process, a check-in/check-out process, among other things - but ultimately we really need to do something differently.  I'm looking for brainstorming/ideas on this front!

I forgot to mention, I'm looking for any / all relevant advice or experience for anyone that has been down a road like this.  Thanks much in advance!

Hello,

I'm writing this from central Iowa.  We have a growing rental portfolio currently of 6 properties.  

We have a couple other local landlords/investors here that are useful to bounce ideas around with.  

Over the last couple of years, we have evaluated several businesses as possible candidates to purchase - the idea being to diversify, but also to allow us some flexibility to capture some value with suppliers that we would be using anyways.  Some of the ones we've looked at have included: a granite shop, a cleaning business, and a tree trimming business.  

Most recently, I linked up with an individual with a very solid background in gutters and window/fascia wrap.  We also have a house under contract that has an especially tricky roof that needs installed, as well as quite a bit of tree trimming and some masonry work that will require someone to be off the ground significantly.  We felt that a bucket truck was justified, and purchased one about a week ago.  We have been able to put it to work immediately on a house that we are rehabbing.  We paid $3200 for it.  

We are thinking of forming a multi member LLC with an operating agreement that in a nutshell spells out something like:

• Revenues OR Net Income Split (30% Owner Operator, 15% me/wife, 55% back into business)
• Our rental operation gets 'close to cost' work from this new company that crosses over with gutters, fascia, soffit, and window wrapping.  We provide some commitment of baseload work for the fledgling company.
• We provide material marketing / IT support as well as function as passive investors/advisors
• Primary Sales and Operational Responsibilities fall on other Members (husband / wife duo)
• Bucket Truck can be rented to our Rental Operation for $1/day if we give enough advanced warning of need, and we can rent it externally, as well.

1. How does the technology work - can we just drop by and get access to a listing with eKey without calling or requesting a show time? What is the usual method? We typically buy distressed REO properties so they are vacant. I'm a little familiar with the 'request a time' technology because I FSBO'd a listing.
2. If Rachel (wife) gets her license can I work as an agent assistant and get access to properties? What about putting in offers?  We are considering which of us is the better person/fit to get the license.
3. How do we go about finding brokerages that would be in line with what we have to offer/etc? I'd assume some brokerages would be perfectly fine with having us under their wing if they got some % cut of the buyers' commission and don't have to do much of anything.  We did about $450k in purchase prices last year and closed on 6 properties.  Are geared up to continue/grow, too.  What is a fair/competitive offer for % of the buyers' commission that we'd share?
4. If we disclose early on to a broker that we would like to start our own brokerage down the road would this be a positive/negative, or what?  What advantages would we have in doing this?