All Forum Posts by: Rich Schmidt

We use our home address. Half of our 4 tenants live in the same building we do, and the other two live less than a block away. There's no hiding from our tenants. :)

I'm guessing your situation is different, though. :)

Jerry, I tried digging into the definitions in the report, and it appears to me that the "extra units" are vacant units.

35 million units are occupied by renters, according to the report. That's more than enough to support 6 million active real estate investors, I think.

As Jon asked, do you know that she's the one opening the door? As Kyle pointed out, it could be defective, or it could be another device in the area.

If I were in your shoes, I'd be notifying the landlord RIGHT AWAY that you've come home to an open garage door. She could be opening herself to liability if your items stored there are stolen due to a defective door or her negligence. As a landlord myself, I'd want to avoid that happening at all costs!

As others have said, she does have the right to keep the opener, just like a key to other doors. So what would you do if you came home and the front door was standing open? You might want to treat this the same way.

The problem with that approach, of course, is that asking for 1st month's rent, plus last month's rent, plus a security deposit (typically equal to 1 month's rent) means you're asking for a significant chunk of change up front.

That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It might be, if it helps avoid getting stiffed at the end of a lease. For us, after 5 years of landlording with 4 tenant move-outs, we've only been bitten once... and in that case, the security deposit more than covered the loss, since we got it re-rented in less than a month.

I have Chase accounts and have used QuickPay once or twice... but I don't think I'll be using it for rent payments after Googling it and finding way too many horror stories about transfers being canceled and accounts locked. Here's just one... that happens to be about a rent payment...

http://consumerist.com/2011/05/chase-quickpay-decides-your-rent-payment-is-fraud-locks-down-accounts.html

erentpayment.com says they charge $3, not 3%. Still not free, but much better than 3%.

It looks like Ryan Beckland has gotten out of real estate. His website to sell his ebook is gone.

Any idea where I might find more about his ideas on the subject?

Sorry, I know this is a bit off-topic... but this thread popped up in a search for something else, and now I'm curious! :)

I've never picked up a rent payment, either... but that's probably because in our 5 years of being landlords, we've always lived either next door or within a block of our tenants. So they just drop their checks in our mailbox on our front porch.

Right now we have 4 tenants: 2 in SFR's next door to each other about 2 houses away from us, and 2 in single-tenant apartments on the top floor of our house. We're the exact opposite of many of you in terms of contact with the tenants! :) (It probably helps that our apartments rent for $600/mo and the houses for $1,100 and $1,600.)

Oh, and the ATM where I then deposit the checks is two blocks away. :)

1. It was the first house we bought to live in. When we moved 4 years later to a different part of town, it wasn't selling, so we found someone who wanted to "lease to own." Two years later, they declined to buy it, so we had it back... in worse shape, of course. But we kept the option fee, cleaned it up, and got it sold.

I don't think of that as our first "real" investment, though (even though I know it was). I think of the house next door, a 3br/1ba rental house that we bought when the previous landlord was tired of it. It comes nowhere close to the 50% rule or anything like it (didn't know about those at the time!), but the rent more than covers the mortgage & basic expenses, and we can cover the major upgrades (like the new driveway being put in next week).

2. Pros & cons? Pro: It's close, easy to manage, lets us choose our neighbors. Con: Not really profitable, but we plan on owning it for life, so it will be once our tenants have finished paying the mortgage for us. :)

3. Sure, if you can afford it. But ideally you should learn more about it first. :)

Interesting. My wife's family lived in Waukesha when I met her 19 years ago, on Cheyenne Blvd. We were married in Brookfield. It's a nice area.

Good luck!