All Forum Posts by: Spencer Zeff

Quote from @Mohammed Rahman:

FYI @Spencer Zeff - I learnt this the hard way. In NYS you cannot make it mandatory for your tenants to pay electronically... if they opt out of being online and want to pay via check/cash then you have to accept it. 

 Hi Mohammed, thanks for your responses! 

Thanks for the recommendation! I will check out apartments.com. 

I thankfully knew about not being able to force tenants to pay electronically and give them the option to do either.  However, I do make it mandatory that they sign up for TenantCloud so that they can submit maintenance requests.  Do you know if that is allowed in NYS?   

Hi all, 

I own and manage 5 units in Brooklyn, NY.  I am looking for recommendations on a property management software/rent collection service.  I currently use TenantCloud, however, it now wants to charge my tenants a fee for paying by ACH.  TenantCloud comes with a lot of features, however, I don't end up using most of them and mainly use it for rent collection.  Does anyone have any recommendations for software suitable for a small landlord like myself? I currently pay $12/month for TenantCloud, so I'm looking for something at that price or below.

Thank you very much!

Quote from @Jonathan R McLaughlin:

@Spencer Zeff meant to add one of my favorite quotes “pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered”

 Good advice! thank you.  We are going to see how the open houses go and gauge the true interest.  If the abundant interest persists, we will adjust the price before accepting application fees. 

Quote from @Drew Sygit:

@Spencer Zeff wait until you actually get applications. 

Those 10 that want to apply now - why didn't you take their applications?

As others have basically said about the level of interest, "actions speak louder than words".

We often adjust pricing depending on actual application volume ONLY.

If we get too many applications, we raise the rent by at least 5% and inform all current applicants.

We have done, "highest & best offers", but that doesn't always go well.

If we are charging an application fee, wouldn't it be "wrong" (not sure if its legally wrong or just sleezy) to raise the rate after prospective tenants paid the application fee?

Quote from @Sergey A. Petrov:

I wouldn’t ask anybody to submit their best offer. I would do some market research to determine the fair market value, change the rate to that (or slightly below if you are so inclined) and then communicate that to the interested parties. You could say something like “due to the unexpected extremely high interest in our apartment for rent, we’ve decided to increase rent to $x. Let us know if you are still interested. We will still be holding the open house as scheduled and moving forward with our normal process of selecting a tenant”

Hi Sergey, 
This is good advice.  We did a fair amount of market research and the comps indicated that the rate we chose was fair market value.  However, our unit was hard to get great comps for, as it has a great backyard with a hot tub.  While getting the highest rate would be great, we also care strongly about the quality of the tenant.  So,  having a large pool of applications to pick from isn't a terrible thing.  We are a very small team, doing the property management ourselves. Thank you very much! 

Hi! 

One of my units is opening up in September.  We decided to raise the rent by 12.75% and put it on all the listing websites, but most importantly StreetEasy (the go-to website for rentals in NYC).  Since we put it on the market on July 26th, the listing has been saved by 141 users on StreetEasy and 34 groups (and counting) are signed up to come to our open houses this week.  On top of that, we have had at least 10 people say they want to apply before they even see the apartment.  Due to this extreme volume of interest, we are thinking it might make sense to raise the rate before our first open house to weed out some of the interested parties.  Our other option would be to ask prospective tenants to "submit their best offer".  Does anyone have any advice/best practices?