All Forum Posts by: Justin Gabriel

It's possible to manage out-of-state successfully without having to deal with a property manager. 

We've done it for the last 3 years in FL with our long-term rentals. I live in CA. My business partner lives in CT. Having a handyman nearby has been our secret weapon to help assess bigger maintenance requests. Sounds like you're in good shape there. We even did a mold remediation and minor remodel remotely. 

Invest in creating your own systems and processes (screening tenants, handling maintenance requests, collecting rent, etc.), and you'll have more time/control/income in the future. It's not hard with the right resources and tech.

After poor experiences with property managers (most do not care about your property as much as you do) we decided to self-manage out of state. Totally doable and we have had success the last few years.

We added a virtual assistant to our team and they are a secret weapon. Combine them with property management software and we see no need for a property manager.

Hi Einar, there are a few threads covering this topic here:  https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

 @Miguel Sevilla no problem. Feel free to DM me or comment here if you have any other questions. 

@Miguel Sevilla here's the template we used for our analyses. It can be tweaked for short-term and long-term rentals. 

• - Click File -> Make a copy
• - Enter in your down payment percentage, interest rate, loan type, and term. This way it'll default to this and you won't need to update it every time.
• - Update the rates/rent, expenses, and appreciation assumptions in the "Future Returns" sheet. These are the annual growth assumptions and will affect your future returns.

https://docs.google.com/spread...

I'm with Nathan -- I'd pay a little more to reduce friction in rent collection.

And to Kris' point -- if I'm math'ing correctly:

$1,200 avg rent * 300 units = $360,000 mo gross rent

$375 mo ACH fees / $360,000 mo gross rent = 0.001% of gross rents

@Mike A. What were they charging before per ACH transfer?

@Bob Anthes I did some research awhile ago and found the r/airbnb_hosts subreddit had some chatter about direct booking sites. We didn't end up going with any of these systems (for other reasons -- we run a hotel and needed a different type of booking software), but there might be something helpful in these threads:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/airbn...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/airbn...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/airbn...

If you're looking for free tools to list your property, I'll add another vote for Zillow. We felt Zillow's Rent Manager had limitations for actually enabling us to manage the property and collect rent, but it was a valuable tool for helping us place tenants without having to pay a property manager to do it.

We've had great success with Zillow after flopping on Craigslist, Facebook, Apartments.com, etc. It's extremely easy to search and apply on the tenant-side, which might be why we received so many applications so quickly.

As a marketer by trade, we did not do social ads (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) for our rentals because I wanted to focus our limited budget on people who were active in their search for rentals (e.g. on Zillow, Craigslist, etc.). If someone is scrolling on their Instagram feed, serving them an ad does not guarantee that they're actively searching for a rental regardless of the type of targeting that was set up. I know others have had success with social ads for rentals, but as small independent landlords, we got a much higher ROI going straight to the source e.g. Zillow.