All Forum Posts by: Stephen Kehoe

Buildium and Rent Manager have small fees for small portfolios. However I wouldn't recommend any software for that size portfolio.

Make sure your locality allows you to discriminate based on income source before deciding not to take section 8. It might be worth looking for another property manager. Section 8 is not that bad and tenants are harder to come by right now due to the Pandemic.

Whether you can discriminate against the source of income (section 8) will depend on your city or county laws. I like section 8 because.

Government's portion of rent is always on time.

you may be able to charge more rent.

tennts do not want to lose their vouchers so may behave better.

tenancies are longer on average.

in my area the housing authority won't let the tenant move out without just cause if they still owe rent.

Buildium and Rent Manager costs scale with portfolio size. So a small portfolio would be cheap. However any software for such a small portfolio could be considered over kill.

Here's what I got. 

Getting an employee on the Baltimore approved inspector list and then performing the inspection is a conflict of interest according to city code. I guess I will have to come up with another way to innovate in the Baltimore PM space. Let me know if you have any ideas.

I agree with @Joe Aiola. There is no rent increase formula based on cost of project over a a time period. Otherwise we'd all put in gold toilets and recoup the cost in that short time period. Before contacting an agent you can use Zillow rent manager to do a napkin calculation like below. 

If your plan is to purchase one property a year and you earn enough to save the 15% each year I like the 15% plan. The lower down payment would be more beneficial if you were trying to scale quicker and might run out of down payments. 

You may refinance in future. But you may not want to due to these reasons. 

(i) Rates are not likely to be as low in the future. 

(ii) You would be refinancing at commercial rates and not the lower owner occupied rates

I know some management companies are still doing showings but space out each viewer.  Maybe now is the time to only do vacant viewings. Here are the benefits of vacant viewings besides the pandemic issue.

-place shows better

-less likely to go stale and be viewed suspiciously due to too many days on market

-less work orders are generated.this way

-if it doesn't rent you know it's price related and not related to the current bed sheets etc.

-less coordination

Hey there Baltimore Investors, 

I am thinking about getting an employee of my property management company licensed to be a Baltimore city registered inspector. Then he could perform the inspections required for the Baltimore rental license free of charge for the owner. The idea is he could perform the licensing inspection while performing one of our regular inspections. Before I invest in this I wish to ask the Baltimore investor community if this would be attractive to them?

That is what I suggest.

Honestly I wouldn't get too caught in trying to find a 203 property either. If there are none close to your work in the next month or two I would just get into that house hack and do the 203 later.