All Forum Posts by: Sheena R Roth

We have 6 duplexes in the Canton area, I stick to 4 school districts: Perry, Plain, North Canton and Jackson. The latter two are definitely out of your price range. You can probably find an up/down duplex in Perry or Plain townships for $150k or less, especially now that the market is softening. My advice would be to stay out of Canton LSD even though it will look extremely affordable, you probably won’t want to live there. 

Marc - I know this post was from a few years ago, but I've also been searching for some inspiration on this topic and am coming up empty, so I figured I'd reach out to see if you eventually came across any helpful info during your search, or did you just create your own system from scratch...?

The lack of feedback here seems a little bizarre considering a sizable portion of the BP community must be reporting some kind of financial snapshot or portfolio performance to private investors / LPs on a regular basis. Maybe everyone's just too shy to share their method? 

Interesting question Nickalaus. I also have a short term rental within my portfolio and I have never considered sourcing leads for that unit through Innago or any other traditional PM software for that matter. 
For our truly short term leads we use Airbnb and solicitation direct bookings outside of the Airbnb platform when we can. 
For midterm bookings (1-3 months) we list on Furnished Finder and market the property in Facebook groups designed for travel medical professionals and landlords to connect. 

Hope that helps!

I just got notified that this post is active again so I figured I'd post a follow up. I have 29 units right now, I was looking at DoorLoop when I was at 17 units. I ended up going with a software called Innago for the property management - which we use in conjunction with Stessa for the bookkeeping. Innago does everything that we need it to: communicate with tenants, listings, applications, leases, maintenance requests, invoicing, and rent collection... I really like how simple and clean the invoice formatting is.

It's really not a big deal for us to keep the books outside of the PM software. 

The customer service at Innago is really great too. 

@Jane S. Hi Jane Yes we did look at the rent rolls. We did see something weird. One tenant was paying way below market rents. We did inquire about it, the lady has been living there 20 years without a rent raise. Yes we did tour and inspect the units. Yes we also did read the leases and when they expire.

This unit is a part of a 6 building package purchase with 12 units total in one of our area’s best school districts. I guess you could say that this purchase is the answer to our dream to deploy some capital we have from a previous sale to shelter it from inflation and continue to grow our long term rental portfolio in a high quality neighborhood.

No there are no other tenants with rents as low as hers. Luckily, even though this landlord didn’t believe in raising rents on existing tenants, he did bring rent up to market when he had tenant turnovers.

Good luck with your rental portfolio. It sounds like a better venture than your retail days :)

@Joshuam Rivera Wow this is a really neat approach. I love it. Thanks so much for posting. This is exactly the type of creative solution I was hoping the bp community would come up with when I posted!

@Jonathan R McLaughlin thanks for these ideas Jonathan.

I have not sat down with her yet to have the serious conversation about raising rents yet. Hopefully you’re right and she can actually afford more than she initially suggested.

I posted on here beforehand while I’m preparing for the conversation with her so that I can bring all of the ideas like yours to the table when she and I meet.

And you are right that it’s easy to assume older people aren’t self sufficient, I would prepare for this conversation the same way if I sensed that a younger tenant had some vulnerability that might make it hard for them to research their options on their own. When it comes down to it, people are a big part of our business :)

Thanks again!

@Paul Camuto Hi Paul. We are buying because this is only one unit in a package purchase of 6 buildings that makes a whole lot of sense for us otherwise.

Also, I am more than willing to deal with it, that’s precisely why I came to BP to seek ideas from our community of highly experienced landlords. :)

I was surprised to just recently learn that it's much easier to get a section 8 voucher in other areas. I just assumed that a long and/or closed waiting list was typical. 

This unit is part of a 12-unit package deal that overall checks off a bunch of boxes on our wish list, and the other 11 units are already rented much higher than this one, so we're going to proceed with the purchase regardless of how things unfold with the little old lady :) 

Thanks for your comments Jack!