All Forum Posts by: Mike Ferguson

Hey everyone, just wanted to introduce myself. I'm an Alabama native and active duty service-member currently residing in Southern California. I'm looking to work my way into real estate investment in the Central Alabama area. I'll be moving back home to Bama sometime soon and want to start making connections for when I do. My industry experience is the buying and renting out of one single-family home in North Carolina in a military community. Just looking to network and learn until I'm back in the area, and ideally purchase a home for rehab and rental soon after I arrive. 

@Brian Corbett I agree and am definitely not trying to get them to itemize down to the nailhole, I guess my angle is more about "touch up" being such a vague term that they don't necessarily have to do anything and they still pocket $500 bucks. I suppose I've got a bit of a trust issue there. I think before and after photos would be reasonable in such a scenario. 

As for payday, your 4 day window would be fine by me, its when I get up to 10 or more days disparity that I start to get a little irritated. 

@Dawn Brenengen You have a point, most of these are small items in the grand scheme of things. Mainly I just wanted to ensure that I wasn't being hosed by these guys, but it sounds like most of what they do is within reason based on expert opinion.

@Dawn Brenengen

@Steven J.

Property is in eastern NC. You may be right on the needing to relax, that's the main reason I wanted to reach out, to make sure I wasn't stressing over nothing. 

I asked for a deeper explanation of "paint/prep" and was told, "It's basically self-explanatory, touch up of any small problems with paint". I pressed them on it and they promised to itemize what it was they were painting in the future. 

I'll definitely have to check out The E-myth, always looking to get my hands on a new book!

@James Kojo 

I hear ya on turnovers being expensive, always seems to cost more when you're not the one living in the house! The $500 I mentioned was sold to me as a "touch up" paint job, on a 1450 square foot 3 bedroom home in eastern North Carolina. Like you say, if they had charged this for a full and complete paint job I would have been a happy camper. But to me being the glass is half-poison guy, I took touch up' to mean "we'll charge you $500 bucks and touch up a couple of spots in one room for 10 minutes with 10 dollars worth the paint".

The maintenance guys are in-house, and they tend to be the same people also doing the inspections, which strikes my nerve as a possible conflict of interest.

@Fred Heller

Your logic makes sense, its just a shame in this internet linked world we live in that we still have such delays with money going from point A to point B. Maybe it's just the impatience in me. I am happy to hear that this time-range is normal though. 

Hey everyone, I feel like I'm having a bad experience with my property management company, but I wanted to get some feedback for a sanity check. I definitely don't want to fire these guys just to find out that they were pretty much the average.

This is for a single-family home in eastern North Carolina, in a military town.

First, my receipt of rent fluctuates from the 4th to as late as the 12th each month, despite my confidence that they receive rent from the tenant on time in all cases. 

Second, on all tenant turnovers, they've tried to charge me ~$500 for "prep and paint as needed", with no breakdown of what needed to be painted, nor a list of what actually got painted. They tried this once after a short turnover of 3 months since the last painting, and were told to pound sand.

Additionally on tenant turnover, they have a tendency to try to charge me for things that were obviously tenant inflicted, such as bent towel rods, etc. 

Finally, their record keeping bugs me. They have finally started using appfolio which helps,  but pending charges still tend to float around on assorted PDF files, and on those months which the tenant pays before the first, his payment wont show up in the current month's statement, this can be figured by doing some homework, but to me the whole point of property management is so I dont have to worry about some of this stuff.

So there it is. Please share your thoughts with me, so I can figure out whether this is bad business or if I'm just stressing over triffles.

Hey guys,

When evaluating properties, what's the best resource for finding out the expected Property insurance rates? Individual quotes from insurers seems time consuming, and they don't seem to want to give a quote unless I'm already in the works of purchasing the property. Much thanks in advance!