All Forum Posts by: John Lenhart

We have kiosks at 2 locations. One is remote, the other is a busy location. At the busy location, it helps with payments of after hours customers who do not like to use the internet and prefer to pay in person. 

The other location is a remote location we installed a year ago. 

Neither of these are a magic bullet and they do not take the place of physical visits or having a site manager at a larger facility or weekly visits to the remote facility. It definitely takes a while for people to become accustomed to the kiosk. You will have low implementation at the beginning but it will grow over time. The kiosk will never become more popular than those who pay via autopay or over the phone so remember to always have those options. I do feel that the kiosk provides value but the ROI is not a ton more than the monthly cost.

When deciding on if the kiosk is right for you I would ask:
1) how big is the facility? Do you want to run it remotely or is there a site manager. The kiosk can help during busy days and also times where the manager is disposed from the office.

2) What are the demographics ? Does your facility take a lot of cash? is the clientele older? Do most pay in person? - We have a couple of facilities where they were a bit heavier in cash payments and also had a population that liked to pay in person at the facility. The kiosk made sense in these cases. If you have a facility that is in a more affluent area, has a clientele that is pretty internet savvy and pays online or autopay, and pays via cc or ACH; I think there are less expensive options than the kiosk. Many of the management systems offer Apps to the customer to allow the customer to pay online and even waive their phone in front of a gate sensor for access. These options can be more cost effective than the kiosk. The downside, they cannot take cash if you have a lot of cash payers or if you have a crowd that is not internet savvy.

Without knowing a little bit more, it’s hard to give you a decent ballpark. Do you know what the caprate is in that market? I can be helpful in ballparking a figure for you. Right now, it appears to be priced around a six If you are saying 3 million. Depending on the area that can be a reasonable price or a very aggressive price. Charlottesville be in a university town, I am Magine this could be something that rents to college kids?

We will continue using QuickBooks for now because our Cpa is certified in that and he can make changes much quicker and cost effective in QuickBooks than he would if he had to learn appfolio for us. However, i would feel comfortable using their platform. Our decision with QuickBooks is driven by our CPA right now more than anything.  

We just switched from buildium to appfolio. Buildium had some nice features but if your goal is to use their expense platform to track expenses in my opinion the Buildium platform absolutely sucks at this. It is pretty restrictive and the GL is pretty cumbersome to navigate in the buildium software. I found appfolio much more responsive in that area. At the end of the day, we used QuickBooks to keep our expenses because Buildium’s expense platform is just not that good. Certainly, there are issues that I miss that Buildium had that I no longer have the option but the back end accounting side was not one of them.

Each bank sets their own rates and will generally price things based on the risk of the borrower and their cost of funds. While it is not set in stone, you can get a pretty good idea where rates are if you google the US Treasury rates and look at the 10 year note. Typically, rates are going to be about 200-225 bps above the published treasury rate for the day. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it will give you a good idea of where rates are. This does not mean you can get a rate that may be .50 basis points better than the competition, but you are likely going to find a rate that will be priced in the 200-225 bps range from the daily 10 year note.

To echo what was said above, Keep your DSCR above 1.25. Keep your building occupied at least 85% some will go down to 80%. You will likely need to bring 20-25% to the table in many cases. Some lenders will do it for 10% down depending on strength of the borrower and their plan after taking over the property.

 I did not think Cincy Federal would lend to out of state Borrowers?

@Tyler Gerhold fortunately in Dayton you can find a number of opportunities given the age of the housing stock in the area. The key is knowing what areas to look at. For example, Kettering, moraine, west Carrollton all offer good workforce housing and smaller units that you may be looking for. We had a lot of success in South Park in the past but it may be picked over a bit now. I think you will find opportunity along the 675 corridor to achieve what you are trying to do

@Sean Zhang keep in mind, if you register in CA and hold the asset in Florida, you will likely need to register as a foreign entity in Florida. This is just another fee you would have to pay. It makes sense to title the asset in a state where the property is located.

If he is a contractor just get a quote per job. If it is a unit turn get a flat labor cost for him to turn and then pay cost of materials. This way if he spends 2 hours or 10 hours on the flip he is paid the same. He gets paid on your approval and sign off.