All Forum Posts by: Steve Rozenberg

Do you see a lot of out of town investors buying deals?

Yes, don't say it... You need to look up and learn Fair Housing and Discrimination Laws and make sure you are not violating any by what you say you will and will not accept.

Being a property manager is really not as much about managing the properties as managing the relationships between all parties.

We manage over 400 homes. That means we have to keep the relationship with 400 tenants,400 owners and a ton of vendors. At the end of the day we have to make it function like a business, keep the tenants happy and keep the owners from getting sued.

It's a relationship business not an object business.

hi Casey

We have owned both sf and MF homes all over HOUSTON and currently manage over 400 homes here in Houston. 

I you would like to message me I would be happy to talk with you and give you my perspective on where the best place to invest in Houston and why.

How do you decide the security deposit deductible?

I would make sure that you have created a written policy and get it to them before you make your next move. If you are called in front of a hearing for violating a fair housing or discrimition law you can say that you let them know your policy and you followed it.

Also make sure just as importnant you send the ones you turn down a denial letter. Remember it's not the person to accept that gets pissed and turns you in. It's the ones you deny that will get you in serious legal trouble. 

I think the best thing you can do is make sure you treat your properties like a business with not only having policies and procedures in place  but followed. Remove yourself emotionally from your properties and treat it like someone hired you to make their business run profitable 

You can be right for 40 years.. But you only have to wrong once to be sued and lose everything. 

That is an interesting business model, It is actually one that I think I followed when I first began investing. My partner and I owned over 30 homes and a 52 unit apartment building. I can tell you from the way we were running it was about as close to "landlord suicide" as one can get. We were not only doing what your post suggested but we were actually advertising "Bad credit OK!".. Guess what we got????? Yep about 3 month long tenants and about a 30% eviction rate... and the worst part was we could not figure out why this was happening.. Then we realized WE were the problem.

Looking back on that business model it was amazing what we didn't know and how many laws we probably could have been called into question. It is like getting in your car putting on a blindfold and then putting it in drive and expecting to arrive at your destination with no scratches on your car. Eventually you will crash and eventually you will get hurt by this business model. 

I do not know the laws in HI but I can say in general that if you put someone who is a child molestor in your property and do not do certain things you can be called into answer why you did not do a screening, Atleast as a PM, not sure if its your property and you own it, but if they go commit a crime and the lawsuits get filed you can be wrapped up in that, whether you did something wrong or not in your mind.

We have realized that 90% of our problems with tenants go away with a proper screening, we basically evict them before they move in, we are very very strict and because of that we have a less then 2% eviction rate with over 400 homes. It all starts with who you put in the property and establishing the rules in the beginning is my opinion.

Not saying you need to be super strict but I would suggest having some type of process in place and documented, if you do not you can get into a fair housing and discrimination issue as to why to accepted one person and took another, also if you turn down a tenant are you sending them a denial letter?

Again this is just my personal experience and my opinon, like you said everyone has a different way of doing things but if I kept on my original model I would surely be bankrupt and lost all my homes by now.

we use the the standard TREC forms then we have about 8 pages of addendums. If you message me and send me your email I would be happy to share with you.