All Forum Posts by: Marcus House

#AskBP I have heard the BP guys say in a number of webinars that when evaluating apartments, it should have a ROI of at least 12%. Is that on Y1 profoma numbers only? Is that an average across all five years not including proceeds from sale? Is that average across all five years proforma including proceeds from sale? Note that this is for looking at apartments of 100 units or more. Please clarify.

For the investor calculator on Biggerpockets.com that I am using to evaluate apartments for buy and hold, when it does its ROI calculation does it include monthly P&I as an expense in calculation of ROI?

Here is what I think it is using:

ROI equals projected annual net income divided by total cost.

My total cost calculation is downpayment plus closing cost plus rehab cost.

Annual net income is projected gross rents for Y1 minus projected expenses for year 1 to include debt service.

Please let me know if this is correct and if not how is the calculator doing this on this site.

@Jack Orthman well said.  Thank you.

Hold up.... There are companies (rentprep) that will do the prior landlord calls for you....  Say what.  That would free up my time big time.  News to me.  I love the fact that both companies are well represented on biggerpockets.com.  Looking to transition more of what I do out of my hands into the hands of competent service providers.  I am going to need to look into their service closely.  From my read of the responses above there are only two companies that the biggerpocket community would recommend.

@Andrea Collatz exactly where is mysmartmove.com pulling eviction history from?  An Judgement with the local court that is not reported to the credit reporting agencies (unless you put the judgement into collection with a collection company) with never show up on a person's credit report.  Please advise.

@Jack Orthman thank you for sharing that.  Everyone I have been reading all of the responses carefully.  I have been doing this for over 16 years and after an "observation" last week with one of my applicants I decided to see what others were doing.  Things have been running very smooth for the past 10 years but just really wanted to understand what other are doing differently to see if there may be ways I can improve.  With most of the responses mentioning getting a criminal background check, I can't help but wonder about something.  Are landlords out there with policies (again in center city neighborhoods) that you will not rent to someone with a criminal record?  If yes is this legal in most states?  I noticed that one responder above stated that they use www.mysmartmove.com to do tenant screening.  In light of the fact that evictions are not reported to credit reporting agencies unless the judgement is turned over to a collection agency and therefore a report like this would not catch most evictions is this really value added for the purpose of identifying evictions?  Is www.mysmartmove.com the most reliable service provider or do other have other alternatives that they recommend (I may need to new post for that one)?

@Anthony Wick  I am curious. Are you charging application fees  in Center City Row house neighborhoods?   Others are welcome to provide their thoughts on this question as well.

It just occurred to me this week that after these many years of renting homes that I only request a single application from one adult which means that if 3 adults wish to move into one of my homes the applicant only need to list the landlord history of the person with the strongest landlord track record.

How are other landlords doing applications (in the City) out there?  I said in the City on purse to get a focused set of responses since that is where most of my homes are.

@John Warren I did not know you could search within Facebook against email. I would have to give that a try and also look at the Google contacts thing you mentioned. Thank you.

I have been seeing in a number of written articles where a number of investors are looking at applicant's facebook page before deciding to rent to them.  It is an interesting concept that I did not consider previously.  How are people doing this?  There are multiple occurrences of a person's name on facebook in the same City.