All Forum Posts by: Miller McSwain

@Heriberto Rivas

There are lots of property management softwares. I'm a single-family investor, and I recently looked through the most popular softwares and selected one. The products I investigated were:

1. Tenant Cloud

2. Apartments.com

3. Innago

4. Avail

5. RentRedi

I was looking for a software that met the following criteria:

1. Online payments from tenants

2. Automatic late fees

3. Maintenance request portal

4. Free for the landlord

5. Online applications

6. Tenant screening (background checks, etc)

7. Lease signing

8. Ability to post vacancies in the software

I found that Innago was the only one to meet all these requirements. It does charge a $2 fee for each rent payment, but that is charged to the tenant by default. I haven't had any complaints from tenants about this charge.

The other softwares were pretty good, but here are the deal breakers for each.

Tenant Cloud: Tenants cannot setup autopay unless we have the paid version

Apartments.com: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease

Avail: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease

RentRedi: No free version

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, you get a discount on RentRedi if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use.

Good luck! 👌

🚀

@Evan O'Brien

I'm not sure exactly what your strategy is, but here is my list of sites for each strategy. I'm currently rent-by-rooming, so I haven't used all the sites listed. I just compiled this list for whenever I do use another strategy.

Traditional Long Term Rental:

- Zillow

- Realtor.com

- Hotpads

- FB Marketplace

- FB Groups

- Apartments.com

- Craigslist

Rent-by-room Rental:

- FB Marketplace

- FB Groups

- Zillow

- Roomies.com

- Roomiapp.com

Short-Term-Rental:

- Airbnb

- VRBO

- Flip Key

- Booking.com

Medium-Term Rental

- Furnished Finders

- Kopa.co

- Airbnb (with 30 day minimum stay)

Good luck! 👌

🚀

@Maximillian Engram

I'm currently House Hacking my first property, and I was advised to NOT put the property in an LLC while we live there. A court would easily pierce your LLC because you are a resident.

So for now, since you have to have an LLC to get business accounts, we have a seperate PERSONAL credit card/checking/savings that we only use for house-hack expenses. We track this completely independent of our other personal accounts AS IF the property was in an LLC.

When we move out soon, we will transfer the property into an LLC, get business credit card/checking/savings that we will use for that property. Then we will use the seperate personal accounts exclusively for the House-hack like before 👌

@Jerry Hill

I use Innago for our property management software, and the tenant can flip a switch to have their rent payments reported to the credit agencies.

Some other PM softwares may have this feature, but I've been very pleased with Innago so definitely check them out 👍

What a creative solution!

A potential issue though is that DSCR likely requires 25%+ down (I would imagine).
A HUGE benefit of using conventional/FHA as a owner-occupant is that you can put 5% down on a single-family or 15% down on a duplex.

I'd be interested to hear from a DSCR lender though to see if any offer 15% down (or less) products.

If you are interested in a duplex, I would DEFINITELY use the FHA. The less money you put down, the lower your cashflow (because your mortgage payment is higher and you pay PMI); however, your cash-on-cash ROI is higher because you put so little down. PLUS, like you said, you would then have lots of cash left over to invest elsewhere OR purchase another house-hack duplex a year later.

One thing to note: for duplexes, Conventional requires that you put at least 15% down if you are an owner-occupant. For a single-family, Conventional allows you to put 5% down. 
So if you were interested in single-family, I would recommend Conventional (like @Karl McGarvey said) because the inspections/appraisals are more stringent for the FHA, and because 5% down is pretty close to 3.5% down.
But in the case of the duplex, even though you may have more strict inspections/appraisals, 3.5% down will yield much higher cash-on-cash ROI than the 15% down.

Let me know your thoughts!

There are lots of "property management softwares".
I'm a rent-by-room single-family investor in Colorado Springs, and I recently looked through the most popular softwares and selected one. The products I investigated were:
1. Tenant Cloud
2. Apartments.com
3. Innago
4. Avail
5. RentRedi

I was looking for a software that met the following criteria:
1. Online payments from tenants
2. Automatic late fees
3. Maintenance request portal
4. Free for the landlord
5. Online applications
6. Tenant screening (background checks, etc)
7. Lease signing
8. Ability to post vacancies in the software

I found that Innago was the only one to meet all these requirements. It does charge a $2 fee for each rent payment, but that is charged to the tenant by default. I haven't had any complaints from tenants about this charge.

The other softwares were pretty good, but here are the deal breakers for each.
Tenant Cloud: Tenants cannot setup autopay unless we have the paid version
Apartments.com: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
Avail: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
RentRedi: No free version

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, you get a discount on RentRedi if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use.

Good luck :)

We've been super happy with our first investment!

If anyone is interested in learning more, check out this podcast episode where I discuss how we were able to get a loan before graduation, which supplies we provide to our tenants, and more!
https://open.spotify.com/episo...

I am using Innago, and I cannot recommend it enough.
My requirements for software were:
1. Must allow for completely custom lease
2. Must be free for me (tenant pays $2 per transaction with Innago)
3. Automatic Online payments
4. Auto late fees
5. Maintenance requests
6. Applications
7. Background checks
Innago was the only software I found that could do all of this! And it has worked great for the 3 tenants I've been managing for 6 months 😁
I'm sure there are other good choices too, but Innago is definitely a great one :)

I'm not sure exactly what your strategy is, but here is my list of sites for each strategy. I'm currently rent-by-rooming, so I haven't used all the sites listed. I just compiled this list for whenever I do use another strategy.

Traditional Long Term Rental:
- Zillow
- Realtor.com
- Hotpads
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Apartments.com
- Craigslist

Rent-by-room Rental:
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com

Short-Term-Rental:
- Airbnb
- VRBO
- Flip Key
- Booking.com

Medium-Term Rental
- Furnished Finders
- Kopa.co
- Airbnb (with 30 day minimum stay)