All Forum Posts by: Mark Brown

@Tim Robinson. Hey Tim. Whoever you hire for your PM, I’d recommend also letting them find your tenant if you have any vacancies. Some realtors will offer to lease the property after helping you to buy one, but tenant screening is really it’s own kind of specialty. Best of luck and let me know if I can be of any help to you.

@Carly Christiansen. Well, yes, if your tenants are feeding them then no amount of pest control will get rid of them. If they leave food out, never clean the countertops, live like slobs, they are a roaches’ best friend.

Hi. As an owner of a property management company, I would say the one full month's rent is pretty typical in the Houston market, particularly when so many renters have their own agents representing them. The one month's rent gets split, typically, 50%-50% with the renter's realtor. But keep in mind, everything is negotiable in a management agreement. But if you offer less than one full month's rent, it may make it harder to market your unit on the mls, since your property's offered compensation will be less than other competitors on the MLS.

On 2), the fee doesn't bind you to use them if you sell the property, only that you'll pay a commission if they bring you a buyer for your property. For example, you can hire another realtor to sell your property, and they will probably ask for about a 6% commission as well. In that case, you would sign a separate listing agreement with that realtor that sets out their compensation. But here's what often happens - you tell your management company you want to sell your property - and a good management company will know lots of other investors, so they might let their other investors know something is coming on the market, and before you know it, one of their other investors is interested in buying your property. And now you have a buyer for your property before you even got it on the MLS. In that scenario, this paragraph protects the management company that you'll pay them some kind of compensation if they bring you a buyer when you don't have a separate listing agreement with the management company. But these things are all negotiable - I've often just left those paragraphs blank, figuring if an investor wants to sell the property, they would want a separate listing agreement and everything put on the MLS. Hope this helps.

@Cristina Enriquez. Usually a competent realtor can boil down a market area to a sold price per square foot for the type of house you’re looking at. For example, 3 bed, 2.5 bath houses built in the 80’s in the clear lake area at 1800 square feet give or take 250 square feet. Then tell you what the average or median sold price per square foot is for that. Once you know this, you can get a rough idea what any similar home in an area will sell for by multiplying the median price per square foot sold times the square feet of the house you’re interested in.

But if you want a realtor to do a bunch of these calculations for you, you may offer to compensate them a little something for their time.

@Michael Smith

Can you make pretty? Add a pond / tank? I know someone with a tank that had trees around it. He put out little cottages around the pond / tank and put all of them on Airbnb.

@Phiroze Neville Divecha. Well, ideally you’d want to maximize the return on your investment by buying a property with the highest rent with the lowest purchase price. It’s all about trade offs. Follow that to its extreme and you’re buying properties in the worst part of town. On paper the rents look good but you pay for it with evictions, tenant turnovers, and excessive maintenance costs. So if I was starting over as a newbie investor, I’d seriously consider brand new starter homes in the suburbs. Everything is under warranty. And it’s new so maintenance costs are super low. You get better tenants. The area is usually appreciating in value. The cost to purchase can be higher but the goal is to break even on cash flow but the depreciation deductions on your tax returns saves you money that way.

Well... places like Daniel Dean, https://www.danieldean.com/, and Kat Excavation, http://katconstruction.net/, would do it for you.  They'll charge you an arm and a leg.  A cheaper way is to hire Red Stag, https://www.facebook.com/redst..., - they'll come out to you, but they'll only do the lot clearing and grading. Then you hire a dump truck driver, ask him to get two or three buddies, and tell him to haul off the dirt that Red Stag digs up, and when done, bring in new dirt.  You gotta find a sand company for them to go get the dirt from. They are usually companies located near rivers, like the Brazos. Or the dump truck drivers can tell you where they've gone before.  To find a dump truck driver, you just have to drive around your area, and when you see a dump truck, look on the side of his truck and you'll find his company. Almost all dump truck drivers are small owner-operator companies that don't have websites etc.  

When you say "scrape the pad and bring in dirt", I do hope that's based on engineering specs. Ideally, you should have a soil test done, and then based on that result, you'll know how many feet of dirt to take away and how many feet of "select fill" to bring in, so your future foundation doesn't buckle or shift on our expansive soils.  Also, this is the time when you need to raise your pad above the surrounding soil, so you'll want to make sure they do that.  Feel free to reach out to me if you have any other questions.

@Mitchel Schwindt. That’s exactly what we do. New build plus pm business.

@Willie Bradley  We do mostly property management and renovation / remodels.  I'd put property management in the business name if I was starting from scratch, but I've been doing this for about 16 years and grew into 3rd party property management when other fellow investors wanted me to help manage their properties.

@Michelle Lopez. Texas doesn’t have reciprocal licensing with most states. However, doing the online course work to become an agent is pretty simple. A long weekend or two and you can take care of the coursework.

And, yes, Texas does seem to be the over populated with agents.