All Forum Posts by: Miller McSwain

I just graduated, and I was able to close a month before graduation by showing my lender my offer letter. If you aren't close to graduation, you may have some options although I haven't proven them:
1. Have someone with sufficient income co-sign (parent, etc). If someone else is on the mortgage that has qualifiable income, I imagine the lender would be willing to accept that. Perhaps you can incentivize a parent by offering a percentage of cash flow, equity, etc.
2. Like you mentioned, DSCR could be a good route since they don't scrutinize over your personal finances as much as conventional. I think DSCR requires 20%+ downpayment typically though. Conventional/FHA would allow 5% or less. So perhaps look into that though.

Here are a couple of potential solutions that may help with some of your issues.

We are currently rent-by-room renting a house. So it is a single-family with multiple tenants on individual leases. One furnace, one electric bill, one water bill is billed to the whole property.
To make things easy, we just pay for utilities. That way tenants don't have issues with each other for someone using more water etc.
So to do this, we either raised the rent to help cover utilities, or we just added a flat utility fee to the lease (effectively just raising the rent). Perhaps this could be a simple solution for you rather than trying to split or bill utilities back?

As far as allowing both units to control the temperature. Perhaps you could get a smart thermostat, and you could put the physical thermostat in 1 unit and have a wireless controller in another. Surely these exist since I can control our thermostat from my phone/smart speaker. This may cause both units to continually change the thermostat setpoint, but they would both have access to controlling it.

 I haven't used the maintenance feature, that is just what tempted me to make the switch. I'm still interested in switching if RentRedi can address the issues I mentioned.
I just looked though, and the maintenance coordination costs $25/month and $12/property.
Then, they will handle all maintenance calls, hire someone to address the issue, and bill you for labor+materials 👍

We are in a very similar situation!
We have a 5 bed 3 bath house (3/2 on main level, 2/1 in basement). We are living in the basement and renting out the main level rooms individually.

Some things to consider:
1. Renting out a portion of the house as rent-by-room, medium-term, or short-term can offer increased income over renting it as a traditional long-term. For example, when we move out of this house in a few months and rent each bedroom individually, we will get $3750/month in rent while we would only get ~$1800/month if we rented the house to a single renter. (We actually plan to add another bedroom soon, then it will bring in $4500/month)
2. Try to separate the main level and basement while you live there. In our house, you can enter the house from the garage, then have immediate access to the basement stairs. So we added an interior door that allows us to access the basement from the garage without entering the tenants' area on the main level. So it is basically like we have our own place!
3. Think about laundry. In our case, laundry is in the basement, so tenants do have to come into our unit to do laundry. To prevent giving them 24/7 access to our unit, we installed an electronic lock that unlocks during each tenant's "laundry window". This is a 3 hour, weekly window that the tenants choose.

I was on a podcast where I discuss lots of details about our house-hack. If you are interested, you can find it in the link below 😊

I had intentions to switch to RentRedi from Innago SOLEY because of the maintenance feature they have. For additional fees, you can have a 3rd party handle maintenance calls, handle the maintenance issue, and bill you afterward. You can even enable this feature temporarily while you are on vacation.

I tested RentRedi out and also couldn't make the switch because the lease signing lacked pre-poulated fields. I was unwilling to sacrifice this feature that I love in Innago. I also disliked that I couldn't make a custom application, but I could let this slide since I require that applicants fill out a custom Google Form anyway.

I'm hopeful that they will address these issues soon! Until then, I'll stick with Innago which has served me very well 😀

I can see where managing many rent-by-room rentals could become challenging like @Garrett Christensen mentioned. It may still be worth it though.
My wife and I have a single rent-by-room (5 bedrooms) property, and we bring in ~$750/room. So $750x5=$3750/month while traditional rents would be ~$1800/month. So we are receiving DOUBLE the long-term rate.
Well worth the squeeze in my market 👍

There have been some great tips posted.
In addition, we have a video tour of the property that we upload to YouTube and share in the listing description.
We are renting by the room, and all 4 of our tenants moved in without taking a physical tour. Most of them were coming from out-of-state, and if we didn't have a video tour that they could view remotely, they likely would have passed on our property.

So having that video could open your listing up to people moving from out-of-state 👍

@Sanat Bhandari

Thanks! I see.

Ideally, we won't have to use the loan (with concessions and such). 

I'll talk to my lender of course. But if we can take the loan out in time to season the funds, we consider the DTI impact, and we consider the credit score impact, then it COULD be a method to acquire sooner?

Thanks for your help!

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 AT THE TIME

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, RentRedi is free now if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use. I did try it out recently, and the only thing holding me back is their lease signing feature. It doesn't prefill any of the lease for you. With Innago, for example, I uploaded my lease and indicated where my name, the tenant's name, checkboxes, etc need to be automatically filled. RentRedi doesn't prefill anything, which is a timesuck and a killer for me :(

We are currently in our first house-hack and will be eligible to purchase our 2nd HH in April (because it will have been 1 year since we purchased the first one). It looks like we will likely have around $20,000 saved, but we will need around $37,000 to close with 5% down + fees in our market. Ideally, we would purchase as soon as eligible so that the 1-year timer for our 3rd house-hack stays on track, and for the 4th, etc.

I'm considering using a personal loan (like Rocket Loans) to get a ~$17k loan to help us finish off the funds needed for purchase. They offer 5 year loans at ~10% interest, which ended up being a ~$400/month payment. We are renting by room so we have increased rental income to support this extra payment, and the numbers still pencil out.

Has anyone done this before? Would I have to let the loan funds season in my bank account for 2 months? Any other considerations?
Thanks!