All Forum Posts by: Jon Shoop

"In the same vein, should I pay a lawyer to draft up an ironclad lease agreement for these types of short term situations or just use a standard form found online??"

Don't use a standard form online. That opens you up to potential claims and situations that you shouldn't or wouldn't be in if you had been advised by a professional and set up with a better agreement. Use a property management company that uses your state's Realtors residential lease agreement, to do the lease out process if nothing else. It'll be cheaper than a lawyer and still give you iron clad lease agreements and terms. 

I know in Texas you have to be a registered realtor in order to use the Texas Realtors lease agreement. 

It might be worth your while just to have a legit PM company manage it all for you, so you can sit back and collect a nice check each month without doing much and being able to pass most liability off on the PM company.

Look into doing a 1031. Sell one property and use the proceeds to roll into buying two more rental proeprties. A 1031 allows you to roll previous real estate sale money into a new real estate venture without having to pay sales taxes. At least that's the layman's term.

We haven't been seeing any downturn in the rental market due to Covid-19. If anything, we have more people willing and wanting to rent houses instead of buying, due to the uncertainty of the market. Also have more people looking to rent houses instead of apartments for many reasons but also because of property owners are much more willing to work with their tenants rather than apartment companies who don't always seem to care about their tenant's circumstances. 

For us at McCaw Property Management, we have had the lowest number of available rentals in years. We can't keep rental houses on the market because they get rented out so fast! That's definitely a combination of things like how we conduct our marketing of available properties, stringent tenant screening, as well as the current market. 

Hope this helps!