All Forum Posts by: Lucas Miles

@Colleen F. I would say easily half, probably closer to 75% of applicants that end up becoming tenants come from FB leads in our area. FB messenger is definitively annoying, most of the people that message are not qualified tenants anyway, but its a great wide funnel that gets noticed by a lot of prospective tenants.   

@Nathan Gesner thanks for the info, agreed posting from a personal page does work, issue we are running into is that it has to actually be someones personal profile, not just one we created to be able to make the posts. 

Our management company keeps getting blacklisted from posting "for rent" ads on Facebook marketplace. In our area, Facebook is the #1 tenants find a place to rent, so this is a major issue. 

What we have tried:

1. Creating a personal Facebook account for our properties. -Still gets locked out randomly, can usually get it back but takes a couple weeks. FB obviously has some algorithm to determine this isn't a legit personal profile. 

2. Creating a Facebook business account. - FB no longer allows business pages to post for rent to the marketplace. 

3. Creating a sponsored ad. - Ad works, but listing still doesn't show up in the marketplace. 

The only way we don't get blacklisted is by posting from one of our individual personal FB account. Obviously not preferred as we do not want to give out personal login information to our management company, and we don't expect them to their personal FB profiles pages to post. 

Has anyone found a solution for this? 

@Chris Thomas you can buy a data base of properties in a certain area with your criteria from https://www.listsource.com/ or a similar website. Some counties also have a way to do this through their online property search features, but highly dependent and the state/county you are looking in. 

@Shawn Adderly reach out to the local municipality that is providing the electrical service, likely your city office. They will come out to reinstall the 3rd electric meter (one that looks to be currently missing) and your electrician can remove the "jump" feed so you have the three separate meters. Likely a fairly straightforward fix, but never know until you get into it.  

@Brittany Wilkerson lot of pros for the duplex (which I would mostly agree with), I'll add in a couple negatives. With a SFR (or 2 in this case), often tenants are responsible for lawn/snow care. With a duplex owner is likely responsible.
Utilities with a SFR are typically 100% covered by the tenant, in the duplex you likely (market dependent) paying for at least the water bill, potentially the heat also.

In my market, I'd rather have a SFR than a duplex for those reasons, however I would much rather have a 8+ unit building than a SFR or a duplex, economics of scale start to play in with more units under one roof.

@Aries Li if these properties are owned by your personally (not LLC), doing a refinance you wouldn't want to put this refinance $ in a account owned by your LLC, (would probably be considered commingling of funds, you want to keep assets owned by you personally vs your LLC separate). There shouldn't be any difference in terms of refinancing if you own these personally or if your LLC owns these properties. You will more than likely be required to have a personal guarantee on investment properties owned by your LLC as well. The purpose of the LLC is to keep you and your personal assets separate from your LLC's assets in the event of a lawsuit.

Currently under contract on a HUD HAP buildings, insane amount of paperwork! Returns are there if you can get the deal closed. Thanks for sharing your story!

@Nasir Smith you are still responsible to pay the mortgage, taxes, insurance, utilities, everything regardless if the unit is occupied or not. "Vacancy expense" is used to run the analysis side before purchasing, you have to assume the unit will not be occupied all the time so this "vacancy expense" can be used along with other normal expenses to determine if the deal will be a good deal or not. 

@Kayla Forsythe congrats on the deal! Working with partners can definitely be challenging without clear expectations and alignment!