All Forum Posts by: Nick L.

If you're paying for it, are you charging higher for rent compared to your neighboring competitors? 

Hello I'm also looking for a reliable and trustworthy Property Management Team. I'm thinking about entering the Texas market soon however I'm getting deterred away from my Uncle who had a dissatisfying experience with a PM team once when he had a rental property in Austin. The PM team he hired weren't really upfront about keeping an eye on the tenants and monitoring the condition of the house. Knowing that my Uncle was living in Singapore at the time, they probably figured that they could get away with lying to my Uncle, since he lives so far away, telling him that they visit the rental frequently and that they maintain it to where it needs to be. Little did they know my Uncle decided to do a little random spot check when he came down to the US for one summer vacation and to his demise he found that the tenants were growing marijuana in the backyard!!

Is there any way around this other than taking the PM word for it? It's becoming really discouraging because hes constantly telling me PM teams are only out for themselves to collect the check so they can get their commission and have no time to baby your rental seeing they have hundreds of houses to take care. I was hoping since I'm not far away like he is (I live in Cali) that maybe I can fly down every 5-6 months to check up on the house myself? The thing is flying down can be time consuming and airline tickets can eat away my profits. Is there a workaround this?

Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought Texas is the most landlord friendliest state of all, so you shouldn't have any problems evicting tenants that don't pay in a heartbeat. If you don't pay up you are out within a week.

My business partner and I have a duplex rental property. We are just finding out that one of the tenants has been sneaking over her boyfriend and his family to abuse the water usage and are taking showers for free. We've just been cited a complaint from the city that the water usage has been abnormally higher than usual. Since we only run one meter and its shared amongst both sides, we can't separate the water bill to each tenant unless we split the water pipeline which will cost too much. Maybe if they keep this up, maybe it will be worth it to just split the water pipeline. Just wanted to seek other's opinions on this and see what other alternative solutions are out there from here on.

Hi Lu! I was just about looking into turnkey properties as well about 2 months ago when you first posted this. I'm also from the bay area working in a 9-5 computer tech company. It's always great to come across someone so close to me who's also looking into REI!

I also feel turnkey is the only way out for us Californians especially since home prices here are through the roof and so over-inflated. Its just not feasible anymore to put down $1.5mil for a house here only to have it rent out for $3-4k/month. You can probably get around that same $3-4k return for a 250k house in texas/arizona/las vegas, etc. I know turnkeys overcharge and markup their prices a bit but I would still be willing to buy into negative equity if I can make it all back within a year or two. Let's say you overpay for a house  (somewhere in the midwest) by $10,000 but make it all back and break even within a year or two with the rent cashflow then it would still be worth it compared to buying a $1.5mil house here in CA to get the same return. In the short run it's ok to lose $10,000 to save yourself ~$1mil if you think about it.