All Forum Posts by: Steve Potash

We have a separate lease for each tenant/bed.  We used to do the group lease years ago.  Individual leases are more tenant friendly, group lease is more landlord friendly.

With property management, we have the same sort of issue.  We implemented all the technology, so now we only need someone part time, but it's hard to find someone part time to do property management. We really only need someone to do 20 hours per week on property management and 20 hours per week on maintenance, but it's really hard to find one person qualified to do both. How do you handle maintenance.  Do you have a full time person, because with the number of units, it sometimes cuts into your profitability too much and newer units don't require as much maintenance.  Thanks

Congrats George.  We've been doing this for a long time, so it's nice to see other people being successful at it also.  Just curious, for your property management, are you paying 6% for everything (I think I saw that somewhere) and are they dedicated to just your properties and in house and how many people are there.. I'm asking because you're in that number of units range where it sometime does or does not make sense to have in house property management based on the finances. Thanks

@Gaetano Ciambriello  Are you able to lease for the 3 summer months to non-students, so that it made sense financially and timewise?  We've tried doing that, but the timing never really worked out plus with getting the apt quickly cleaned and maintenance before the summer rental and then quickly before the fall semester started, wasn't worth the effort for the amount of rent.  Just curious, if it worked for you.

You might or might not know this, but even though cumberland is within 15 minutes of Frostburg, students in frostburg normally don't live in cumberland, so you can't value a cumberland property the same way you value a Frostburg property.

Frostburg requires freshman and sophmores to live on campus, while the majority of juniors, seniors and grad students live off campus. They just built a new dorm, but one of their older  dorms had a lot of issues and needs a huge expensive renovation, so its been  shut down.

Student housing is a really good investment if you know what you're doing and a really bad investment if you don't know what you're doing.  I've been investing in student housing in Frostburg for 29 years.  My apts are the new red buildngs across from campus...I think we might have been building them when you were there.  You have an advantage, because you understand the Frostburg student housing market and the differences between the different streets and houses.  You're negative is that you are 2 1/2 hours away and you're brand new.  The one thing that makes people fail, is they think that if they read some student housing books and podcasts, they're now an expert in student housing.  I'm not saying not to read them, just realize, it will make you only 50% knowledgeable.  Each university is completely different and you have to understand the housing dynamics for that university, so books and podcasts can't dive deep into each universities strategies.   If you are planning on investing in Frostburg, you really need someone local in Frostburg that understands student housing to manage your properties, plus that can steer you in the right direction, based on your investment strategy, to buy the correct student housing.  

For leases, I have done both individual and group leases.  They both work (as long as you modify them), and it really depends on what everyone else in your student housing market is using.  For example, if everyone is using individual leases, and you try to use a group lease, the students (and parents) will gravitate to the properties with individual leases. It also depends on what software crm you're using, because some software packages work better as either group or individual leases.

Originally posted by @Nate Monson:

@Account Closed If you can find something wrong with my numbers please let me know. :) 

I can't really tell what you have in repairs, but you want to treat this like a business and capture all of your expenses. For example, are you putting this in an entity like an llc...most states have an annual fee. Also, you'll have a cost for a cpa to do your books. Cell phone expense, website, advertising, cutting the lawn, electric, snow removal (depending on where you are), pest control, lawn insect control, cleaning after students move out, any software costs for lead generation, tenants payments, online lease generation, etc.... plus how old is the property ($1,700 per yr is low if it's an older property). It's always better to overestimate and catch every expense, than underestimate and think your NOI is higher than it is, because then you'll overpay for the property. Also, some towns have annual rental property inspections, lead paint inspections, etc. When I first started out with student rentals, I probably missed alot of these, but I've now owned student rentals for 28 years, so I'm getting a bit better at estimating costs.