All Forum Posts by: Matt R.

Take a look at Consumer Reports magazine; they review washers and dryers every couple of years.  I'm not sure how often they do the stackable models, though.  They actually buy the appliances at retail and do their own tests, and they don't accept advertising.

They have a Web site, but you have to be a subscriber to see their rankings.  Many public libraries also subscribe; I can log in to my local library's Web site first and then pull up articles from Consumer Reports' site for free.  I think they also have paper copies on the shelf at the library - at least the last couple of years' worth.

Don't get that magazine confused with Consumers Digest.  Consumers Digest follows the traditional "product review" business plan - the more ads you buy in their magazine, the better your product is ranked.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional plumber.

> Generally, what are the requirements to install individual water meters in an apartment.

As long as there is an individual pipe to each apartment, the plumbing part is pretty simple: you cut about 6" of pipe out, install the fittings for the meter, install the meter, and install a wire jumper around the meter (in case the electrical service is grounded to the water pipe).

It helps if the meter is somewhere that somebody can read it each month.  Or, get the kind of meters that can be wired to a box on the outside of the house (or otherwise in a better spot), and the handheld device you need to plug in to the box or talk to it on the radio, to read the meter.

If the building was "born" as apartments, it's fairly likely that each apartment has its own individual water pipe.  If it was converted later, then some apartments may share a pipe.  Sometimes two apartments are mostly separated, but one fixture is actually plumbed in to some other apartment's pipe.  If you're not sure, you may have to turn off apartment A's water and check apartments B, C, and D to make sure all their fixtures work.  Then, turn A back on and turn B off, check A, C, and D, and so on.

If the property has an outdoor hose bibb, you get to decide how to handle that, too.  If it's on apartment B's meter, then the tenant in B gets mad when anybody from A, C, or D washes their car.  If it's not on any of the apartment meters - then sometimes that works fine, and sometimes one of the tenants runs a garden hose from the bibb, through the window, to their washing machine.  :D

Disclaimer: I've done this exactly once.

Here are some things I did in the last few days of renting out my single-family house.

Go around to all the rooms and make sure everything works - doors open and shut, windows open, shut, and lock, mini-blinds (if any) are securely mounted and work, curtain rods (if any) are securely mounted, closet rods are securely installed, none of the light bulbs are burned out, etc.  If you were thinking of oiling a door hinge or putting a new screw in the curtain rod bracket - now's the time.

If you have mini-blinds that have pull strings to operate them, take the time to trim the strings such that they don't dangle to the floor, and install a cleat on the wall next to the window so the strings can be wound around the cleat when the blinds are pulled up.  This keeps little kids from getting tangled up in the cords.

Make sure all the appliances work - mostly in the kitchen, but also things like a garage door opener or sump pump, if the house has one.  Run all the sinks, flush all the toilets, run the shower and tub to make sure they are OK.

Put fresh batteries in anything that needs them - smoke detectors, doorbell, garage door opener remotes, closet lights, etc.

Make sure you have enough door keys for both you and the tenants.  If you haven't changed the locks since you bought the property, do so!  If you have to get more keys cut now, take all the keys to the house and try each one in all the locks, several times.  This prevents "I went to use the second key and it doesn't work" problems.  If any of the locks are stiff, lubricate them - my locksmith recommended "Tri Flow" spray, which I used to good effect.

If the house has a garage door opener, gather all the remotes you have, tell the opener head to forget all the remotes, and then learn in the ones you have.  (This prevents former occupants from accessing the garage.)

Do the last cleaning on the house.  You probably want to do this as close as you can to when they move in.  Bring a stepladder and a flashlight and clean all the nooks and crannies that nobody ever cleans.

Do the last yard work on the house, if it has a yard - mowing, trimming, anything like that.  If it's a house in the city with no yard, maybe sweep or wash the stoop and sidewalk.  Pick up any trash in the yard, along the street, etc.  This should happen as close as you can get it to when they move in, but it's OK if it happens 3 or 4 days before.

If you don't already have them, write down the model and serial numbers of all the appliances.  Take a picture of the model number label, if you can.  This helps in case you need parts later, or in case an appliance is removed or swapped out.

Get whatever things you want to have in the house at move-in.  At my rental, I left a new roll of paper towels, a bottle of Windex, a new bottle of hand dish soap, a new bottle of hand soap, a 4-pack of toilet paper, and a pack of clothes hangers in the house for move-in day.  The bathroom stuff ensures that they can use the bathroom, even before they move anything else in.  The kitchen stuff helps them clean up after move-in day fast food.  :)

Get ready to switch over any utilities.  With water, gas, and electric, usually those will stop on their own when the tenants get them put in their name - but be sure to watch the bills to make sure they do this.  I had to call the trash company and stop the service myself, because the tenants selected a different one.

Does the city where the property is require you to have a business license, or to register your rental property?  You should have already found out about this, but if not, try to get legal this week.

To address a couple of specific things:

> radon testing

Either this is OK or it isn't, and if it isn't, you will be asked to buy an expensive blower system.  For some reason, the companies that sell tests *and* blower systems always think you need a blower system.  The test can be done in the next week, but scheduling the blower install may not be possible in that time.

> number of smoke alarms per unit

This is a building code thing.  The minimum standard is one per floor.  The next step up from that is one in each bedroom, plus one in the hall outside the bedrooms.  The next step up from that is one in each place where people would conceivably sleep (like in the living room, for people that sleep on the couch).  Some cities will require that new ones be the type that are wired in to the 120 V AC and have a 9 V DC battery in each detector.  These are usually also wired together, so if any detector smells smoke, the horns on all the detectors sound.

If you don't have enough detectors, and If local building code allows it, you can easily get battery smoke detectors at the hardware store or even Wally World and install them in a few hours.  If the wired kind are required, and you don't know how to do it yourself, you'll need an electrician, which may be a challenge to get done within a week.

I hope this helps!

Disclaimer: I only have one property and I didn't buy it turnkey.  I have looked at some turnkey houses for sale over the past couple of years, but I've never bought one.

One piece of advice: question everything that's on the "pro forma" sheet - the thing that says "it will rent for $X a month, mortgage will be $Y, taxes are $Z, so your cash flow is $A".  I clicked on an ad for one turnkey property yesterday because it happened to be a couple of miles from my residence. The estimated rent was probably pretty close to right, but the property tax seemed low on a per-month basis. I looked up the property at the county's Web site, and found out the taxes hadn't been that low since 2004. They also thought you could get insurance on it for $40 a month (fire insurance, not PMI), but based on what I pay for my residence and my rental, $65-$70/mo is closer to reality. They claimed a cash flow of about $330/month, but without even trying very hard, I knocked that down to $275 or so a month. I have seen pro-forma sheets on other houses that would give projected property values/appreciation for the next few years, and those seemed to me to be a bit overstated as well.

Second piece of advice: buy something local or kind of local for your first one.  (Kind of local means you could drive over there in a few hours if you wanted to.)  You will already know more about the neighborhoods and can more easily find out about the rents if it's local.  It's also easier to see the house in person and drive around the neighborhood.  Check out the neighborhood both with and without the salescritter, and drive by in the day and at night, if you possibly can.

(Buying local is harder to do if you live somewhere like the SF Bay area or New York City where prices are nuts.  Even in those cases, I tell people to at least get on a plane to see the property and the neighborhood before they buy it.  Here in Kansas City, a lot of properties in not-so-great neighborhoods get marketed to out of state investors.  People can invest in any type of property they like, but I feel like they should understand what they are buying before they sign.)

I hope this helps!

I did a couple of things like this when I rented my one SFR (so far).

The house already had a door mat outside the front door, but it was old and beat up.  I bought three inexpensive ones at the hardware store and put them outside, at the front door, garage walk door, and basement door.

Most of the upstairs has hardwood floors, so I provided a microfiber mop, a gallon of Zep hardwood floor cleaner, a quart spray bottle, and even a funnel to get the cleaner into the spray bottle.  I take a new mop head over there when they ask, which turns out to be every several months. The mop heads are machine washable, so I think they only ask when the old one gets really beat up.

(I actually bought the mop and a spare head to clean the floors while I worked on the house; the mop cost about $20 new at Home Depot, and the heads are about $7.  I just left the mop and the two heads I had at the house when they moved in.)

When my tenants moved in, I also put a few things in the house: in the kitchen, a bottle of hand dish soap, a kitchen scrubber sponge, a bottle of rinse aid for the dishwasher, and a roll of paper towels, and in the bathroom, a 4-pack of decent quality toilet paper (still in the plastic) and a bar of soap (still in the box).  I didn't provide a garbage can, but I had what was left of a box of 13-gallon kitchen trash bags, so I think I left those there as well.  I didn't expect to (and don't) provide any of this stuff on a continuing basis - it was just there for move-in day.

If your tenants are coming from a previous apartment/house/dorm, they will probably have at least a microwave and a garbage can already.

Disclaimer: I only have one property so far. I am not affiliated with any sites mentioned.

I use Cozy.co for background checks and collecting rent. I don't use the other features they offer (application, maintenance requests, document sharing, listing syndication). I wrote a detailed post about it here:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/52/topics/546...

One recent change: in early November, 2018, Cozy got bought by CoStar, which is the company that runs apartments.com .  I haven't seen any changes yet, but I also only got the email about this a couple of weeks ago.  Cozy's post about it is at https://cozy.co/blog/great-news-cozy-joins-costar/ .

I hope this means that CoStar wanted to offer Cozy's payment platform to the landlords that advertise on apartments.com .  I'm concerned that it means that CoStar (who makes money off of the owners of the 500-unit complexes) is going to screw up Cozy (who seems to mostly make money off of people with smaller rental portfolios).  

Cozy's rent collection does take a little while. I get an email when the tenant has pushed the "pay the rent" button (which I think is when the money comes out of their bank account), and another email when the money hits my bank account. It is almost always 5 calendar days between those two emails. I think, but don't know, that Cozy is day-trading or otherwise short-term investing the money for those 5 days, in order to fund their service. They have an option where you can pay a couple of extra bucks per property per month and get the deposits sooner, but I don't use it.

When I looked at Cozy's application builder, you could kind of customize it with predefined blocks, but you couldn't really add your own free-form questions. I suspect it's been through lawyers from several states.

I didn't use Cozy's syndication, because it didn't go to very many places when I looked at it. There used to be a really good listing syndicator called Postlets, but Zillow bought it and nerfed it.

If you use Paypal, it may be helpful to have a "business" Paypal account.  I set one up for an organization I worked with, and when I had a question about the account, I was able to get a human at Paypal to help me resolve it.  I have been told by some people (not landlords) who were using "personal" Paypal accounts that it's kind of easy for Paypal to decide that you're violating their terms, shut off your account, and not answer questions about it.

I don't get money from any companies mentioned.

I hope this helps!

Originally posted by @Carlos Garcia:

2. How can I tell if the costs quoted are reasonable?

One thing you can do is go to your local Home Depot, Lowe's, or equal and price out the materials for these repairs yourself.  The prices will probably be a little different from WA to NC, but they won't vary that much.  Then, subtract the materials cost from $4,800 to get a labor cost.  Divide the labor cost by what you think a good hourly rate is, and see if the number of hours matches reality.

For the hourly rate, the federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour.  If you can fog a mirror, Walmart will pay you $11 an hour.  So a handyman probably makes more than either of those.  You also get to pay for part of the insurance, tools, etc, too.  Something in the range of $25 to $50 an hour might give you some approximation.

For "matching reality", you have to figure out about how long you think this stuff would take.  I haven't broken it down in detail, but your list looks like at least a couple of days' work for one person.  The drywall work and cleaning the gutters are probably the items that take the longest.

I hope this helps!

I only have one SFR, but here's what I do.

I send the tenants an email about 5 days to a week in advance of the earliest date I would like to visit.  (It has to be at least 24 hours in advance, but I like to make sure I've given at least that much notice.)  I say "I'd like to visit the house in the next couple of weeks", tell them if there are times I can't be there, what I propose to do at the house, and about how long I think it will take (plus a little margin).  I also ask if there are any maintenance concerns that I can take care of while I'm there.

Usually I get an email back that same day or the next day with a proposed time, usually Saturday morning.  If I don't hear from them by the next day or so, I send them a text asking them to check their email; I then usually get a reply email within a couple of hours after I send the text.

When I go to the house, I have everything I know I'm going to need (filters, batteries, etc).  I also tend to take my general set of hand tools, just in case they ask about or I notice something simple to fix.

After I get done, I send them another email that says "I came to the house on Saturday, November 32nd, at 11 AM, and checked/did the following things."  I don't expect them to reply to that one; that's just for both of our records.

I hope this helps!

Disclaimer: I am not a professional electrician.

If there is an attic you have access to, go up there.  I've been in a couple of old houses that had been partly rewired, but there was still live knob and tube in the attic.

You or the electrician might be able to tell by taking the cover plates off of receptacles and switches, but you/they might also have to pull the receptacle or switch out of the box to tell for sure.  The difficulty here is that if the wire really is that old, doing that may disturb the insulation on the individual conductors, making them short to each other or the outlet box.  Then, you have to either leave that circuit shut off, or fix wiring that you're planning to tear out later anyway.

If you still have lots of 2-prong outlets in the house, it's possible that those are fed with knob and tube.  They could also be fed with something more modern, like armored cable (BX) or nonmetallic cable (Romex) with no ground.

It also happens that a 2-prong outlet breaks and somebody goes to the hardware store.  New 2-prong outlets are $3 and new 3-prong outlets are $0.50, so they just buy a 3-prong outlet and install it without hooking up the ground to anything.  In other words, having a 3-prong outlet installed doesn't guarantee that there actually is a ground at that outlet box.  (Having a ground at the box suggests, but doesn't guarantee, that it's wired with something more modern than knob and tube.)

Sometimes when somebody says "the service has been updated", it just means that they put in a new service entrance, which usually means a new meter, meter socket, and breaker box.  The original wires are connected to the new breaker box.

The home inspector should have at least the "plug with three neon lights" tester (which tells you if you have a ground at an outlet or not) and the "fat pen with the end that lights up" tester (which tells you if a wire is live or not, without touching it).  Make sure they use them.  :)

I hope this helps!

I have looked at both Rentometer and Zillow's "rent Zestimate".

Of the two, I like Rentometer a little better, mostly because it shows me the properties it's getting data from. Sometimes this lets you tell if it's doing something wrong.  I've seen it including both single-family and multi-family properties in the estimate, which may not be what you want.  Also, I was once researching a property in a far suburb, and it came up with an estimate that seemed high.  Looking at the map, it couldn't find a lot of comps in the same suburb as the property, so it was pulling some comps from one edge of the next suburb closer to town, which happened to have a lot of higher-end properties in it.  When Rentometer is working right, I also feel like its estimates are a little closer to reality than Zillow's, at least in my area.

Zillow kind of buries the rent estimate on their site, which maybe tells you something.  Find a property, expand the "home value" section, click on "Zestimate history & details" to expand that section some more, and look underneath the chart of past values for the rent estimate.  As far as I know, Zillow doesn't show you how they derived their estimate, or allow you to search around an address like Rentometer does.

A Rentometer subscription might be worth if if you need to research a lot of properties.  (Alternatively, dump your cookies, your Flash cookies, and your local storage, go back to Rentometer in "incognito"/"private browsing" mode, and see if that helps any.)

In some areas, the MLS is available to mortals and not just real estate agents. Sometimes all you can do is look up houses for sale, but sometimes you can access other functions of the MLS. It may be worth a little Googling in your area of interest.

I don't get money from any companies mentioned.