All Forum Posts by: Mike Craig

Quote from @Manco Snead:

Based just on personal experience, their behavior is nothing out of the ordinary for a PM company. I currently have an OOS PM who is still in the "we'll see" phase. Beyond this I'm done with hiring PM and will be readjusting my whole financial plan in a way where I don't have to involve them in my life. The arrangement seems inherently flawed; for, let's say, $200/month how much attention can they be expected to put towards your property? Worst that can happen for them is they lose your business ($200/month) while worst case for you is they blunder your entire property. Again, just speaking based on my experiences.

This is my new philosophy on it as a whole. Outside of the services provided at move in and move out there is nothing else that they do in between that they seem to care about or put much effort in.  I will be maintaining everything within arms reach in the future and no longer trusting PMs to any aspect of upkeep. 

We are probably talking hundreds of dollars of difference for a few of the small things... The HVAC may be thousands.. I will talk to some pros and get some quotes and pick a lane.  Thanks, Fellas. 

We are terminating our relationship with our current PM and have some issues with the work they had done in our absence.  They managed this property for us while we were on the other side of the country for two years.  They had their HVAC vendor come out multiple times and finally insisted on replacing the air handlers to fix over freezing issues.  The work was done extremely slow and now that we have been back to see it the hvac closet it full of trash and debris from their work and the unit is still not performing as it did for the 6 years before we rented it out. They also had random shotty repairs performed around the house without out consult and they are terrible and will need to be replaced.  Do I have an leg to stand on from a legal point of view holding the PM and their people accountable for this B rate work?  Can I insist on compensation or better repair?

I have two applications in.  1 is a single-tenant, the other a group of 4.  The single-tenant completed all of her stuff and by my standards is qualified.  The group of 4 has completed 3 of 4 of their smart moves and 1 of 4 of their basic application questionnaires.  Smartmove links were sent 48 hours ago, apps for other info were sent almost 24 hours ago.  Am I out of line to just move forward with the completed application and reject the incomplete group of 4?

We are sourcing our tenant ourselves but will be transferring to a property manager once we have them in place. That being said, we need to collect security deposit ourselves and would like to electronically. It looks like most of the online services either charge a fee or want to set up auto-billing of rent at the same time you do a security deposit.  Any pointers?

All

I am in the process of screening people to rent out our home for the first time, so please bear with me.  

We were recently screened ourselves through COZY and were impressed with the detail of the report that was generated. COZY isn't allowing new landlord signups so the consensus we got from people here was to use smartmove.  

We directed our applicants to smart move and are underwhelmed with the results.  One tenant is scoring a 633 per smartmoves own scoring system but smartmove is indicating that their income is likely significantly lower than what they are self reporting.  I am seeing no information on employment or previous rental history.  Are neither of those included in smartmove? I know I can just go ask for that information myself but I was expecting a more concise "one and done" sort of report.

Thanks!

So I used this to screen two potential tenants, however, the applications only came back with their credit and background checks, no detailed information about rental history, employment, etc like Cozy. Is there more that comes in on these reports after a certain amount of time or is finding the rest of me as smart move doesnt report it as Cozy did?

Hey All,

Renting out my home for the first time and was leaning towards cozy only to find out that I cannot create a landlord account on cozy and have to go through apartments.com. Is it safe to assume the new output from the credit and background check is going to be similar if not the same or are things going to be watered down to a zillow level now?