All Forum Posts by: Sergio Altomare

@Antonio Marte one mistake that just came to mind for me was not hiring a CPA till last year. I've been doing my and family taxes for 20 years, but I truly underestimated the value of an accountant with deep knowledge of RE investing. He's not only helped with taxes, but he's also taught us a lot on entity and structuring deals.

@Christina R. First, most things will break and many things are easier to replace then they are to repair, but 2 things to suggest, 1) base the cost and quality on the type of tenant that you are trying to attract, and 2) the more features something has the more likely it is to break. I would also not get too fixated on specific products, because if it is bad then you are more likely to run into large-scale problems.

Like @Marcia Maynard I also am constantly examining hotels and commercial properties to see what they are using.

@Rob Thrasher Welcome! I would suggest you start by scouring every topic, article, book and subject you can to learn from the fine folks here and everywhere else, but don't be too gung ho and go out and buy something because you want to get into it. 

Good luck!

@Account Closed First floor units get better rent because of the yard (dogs and BBQ's), with upstairs being the same price if the square footage is more due to not having common hallways or stairs. We've never had a tenant or prospective tenant choose a floor based on perceived noise. If you are going to allow dogs then you should have a pet deposit/fee (we do a non-refundable fee) and it's an extra $40 a month for dogs under 50lbs and $75 for over. Be sure to explore restricted dog breeds too, as you don't want common aggressive dogs in the place. One bite and you're in trouble. Here's an article that has some listed 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201405/14-dog-breeds-blacklisted-insurance-companies

@Stephen G. I used Rocket Lawyer to form one of our LLC's and did the last one myself, so that's easy to do. An attorney can charge you up to $2k for something you can do yourself. The conversation you need to have is with your lender and title company, but do your own research and look online for LLC operating agreements to see the lingo.

@Antonio Marte I would echo the distance comments, especially when you are targeting $100-$200 NOI per month. I would also ask why SFR? My partner and I have been in the game for 3 years and only do multis, with triplexes being what we are most after. A vacancy in a MFR still gets the bills paid. I don't know what your budget is, but we are doing very well in Philly, which is a bit away from you, but not nearly as far as DFW. We started slow and started our own management company to really keep our properties in line. We've now graduated to syndicating deals with friends and family. I would also caution on the realtor, and find out how many properties they own and what their cash flow is. We were taken to many s-holes by different realtors, who claimed they were cash flow, blah, blah blah, but we could never rent out some of the places to a living human.

Good luck.

@Trevor Ewen we actually own/manage a total of 5 properties and 12 units, so we're not big at all. Everything we do though, is with a bigger goal in mind. And like I said, we both have day jobs, so we need to manage as efficiently as possilble. Thanks for the tip on PipeDrive, I'll check it out. I don't have a lot of confidence in it being able to eliminate some of the manual work we need to do with contact management, but we'll see.  I have looked at Xero too, but my biggest challenge is that I am tied to my management system, which unfortunately doesn't do well with integrating to other systems. Hopefully we'll get there someday.

@Ryan Swan Thanks for the feedback. Yes, Docusign is now integrated into PW. You can use mail merge templates for leases, inspections, etc to get things signed. It was just released recently, but is definitely promising. We also like to discuss the leases directly with new tenants, but getting them signed electronically saved all the printing and scanning. I can say that prior to PW integrating with DocuSign I was using trial periods to test SignNow, DS and a few others. DocuSign has a feature where you can pay per "envelope," which is $1 per, so check that out. I remember it being some obscure way of using it that way and didn't see them advertising it on their site. I remember first discovering it while traveling and needing to get something signed on my phone and downloaded the mobile app.

 The first two things that popped in my head were accounting and lead management. 

From an accounting perspective, PW does have the capability to ingest bank QFX files for transactions and it only has a one way sync to any accounting platform, which is silly being that it is PW to QuickBooks.

From a lead management standpoint, we are at the mercy of the useless "get more information on this listing" forms and emails we get in different forms from the Trulia, Zillow and HotPads of the world. I am anal about saving and organizing all my leads, so I have to save the contact info into Google and then sync it to PW and group them In both places. I also have to export and import them to get them into Vertical Response. 

How about you?

Hi @Melissa Melia,

We actually started out using Buildium. I did some extensive research on software and couldn't justify the costs of PW or Appfolio at the time - both were our ideal products. After using Biuldium for almost a year it became obvious that it was not a platform that could scale the way we needed to. We ended up with PW instead of Appfolio because of the more advanced and integrated features, like Google sync and Mail Merge templates, but also because the cost of Appfolio was still too high to justify. I just did another take on Appfolio's site and there aren't enough details to tell me if the features are on par with PW. I'd love to use Appfolio to see how they actually compare, but PW is a solid enough platform that serves our needs very well. 

Be sure to check with state laws if you plan to transfer it after the sale, as PA considers transferring a property into an LLC a transfer of ownership, and therefore comes with a transfer tax. If financing, the lender can also claim the loan amount due in full. If financing under an LLC, it is usually considered a commercial loan, so the rates aren't as good.

We buy our properties through entities and name the LLC or LP as the property address, therefore waiting until we find the property.