All Forum Posts by: Alejandro Saenz

After 5 months of trial and error I've found an amazing mentor that I've been meeting with every weekend for the past 2 months. I just wanted to share the story because I had to reach out to several investors until I finally found someone that was willing to work with me.

These are places where I tried to find someone:

--My local REIA but didn't have much luck there.

--Googling "we buy houses" and contacting those investors through their online form.  

--Lastly I pulled a list from our assessors page and imported into excel. Found people with 10 or more properties here in my area. For those where an LLC owned the property I found their companies online and emailed them.

Finally the investor I'm working with now replied and he agreed to go out and have coffee. 

One of the most important things I learned is, present yourself as someone who can bring some value to the table. Don't talk about the thing that you want to learn, instead tell them how you can save them time, or make their life a little bit easier. Whether it is posting rental ads in the internet, interviewing potential renters, or even hanging mini blinds. I'm a professional web developer, and I bring value by helping them with their web presence.

Be persistent, you never know if the next email is the one that someone will reply too. 

@Joe Fornasiero, you will have have capital expenses for larger items, and recurring maintenance for leaky faucets and such. You will want to keep a monthly budget for both of these. To figure out how much to put aside for capital expenses have an inspector tell you what's the useful life on big components.

For example, if the inspector says the water heater has 5 years left of useful life and the roof still has 10 years. Maybe the carpet needs to be replaced right away. After you have this list, you can figure out how much it will cost to replace these items. From there you can calculate how much you need to put aside each month, so that when the heater needs to be replaced in 5 years you already saved up for it.

Recurring maintenance items will be a little harder to calculate. Based on the size of the house, age and any deferred maintenance from the previous owner, this number can fluctuate quite a bit. The best thing would be to rely on your home inspector to see whether or not that house will require $250 or $400 a month in maintenance.

Also from my experience you will find that nicer areas with higher property appreciation will have less cashflow. And viceversa, worse areas with no appreciation will have the higher cashflows.

There a few pros and cons that you'll want to keep in mind:

You will have a larger tenant pool which means fewer vacancies. Keep in mind you can have them sign a lease for the full year as well. You could allow them to sublet the place if they are not planning to live there over the summer, although that might incur more risk by letting them find a tenant for your property. 

I agree with Scott that some of these students may not have a stable income. At the same time a lot of them will have some kind of financial aid that helps to pay for their expenses, it's just a matter of renting to the right person.

Along with the big tenant pool from a college comes the issue of high tenant turnover and like Scott mentioned above, college students can be a little harder on your property than a family in well established neighborhood.

Having a rental near a college will require a lot of attention. You will have more wear and tear, higher turnover, and even the occasional complaint from neighbors. You will have to figure out how hands-on you want to be with your properties.

I'm in the same situation as well. We own a triplex here in Des Moines too! and we are moving to Central Florida by the end of the summer.

Since we wanted to keep the property, we hired a property management company and tried it for a while. This allowed me to see if it's something that would work out long distance while we are still here. So far we had some issues mostly communication (which will be very important once we aren't here). Right now we are trying another company and so far we haven't had any issues with them.

Depending on where you buy and the whether or not you can get high quality tenants in your properties you may be able to make it work without a property manager. I know for my property (and older triplex in not the nicest area of town) I wouldn't be able to manage it remotely.

I don't have a problem with them doing all the work, that's what I want. But for transparency it does seem strange not wanting to give a breakdown of what they are charging for.

The person I'm dealing with is the actual owner of the business (they are a small husband/wife business)

Rob K, here's a link to the same list the city made for the repairs

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94073474@N03/8558746945/in/photostream

Thanks everyone for the great advice! I insisted on getting an itemized list of the charges. He gave me a list of the problems the city came up with which include:

2 doors to be replaced
Gutters to be fixed
Stair Railing to be fixed
Soffit/Facia fixed
Couple of window screens

After seeing the list I can see a couple of items that could be kind of expensive. What got me wondering is his response about the itemized list with individual prices:

"Too often when a bid is completely broken down someone on the other side wants to somehow take care of part of the items themselves or by another contractor. This has led to a one price bid that takes care of all of the work. He will do all of the work to pass the inspection or none of it at all but not part of it. "

Again I haven't worked with a PM in the past so I'm not sure if this is in fact the way things work. Thanks again for all your responses.

We just had the rental certificate inspection done in our multifamily rental. The inspector came back with some items that need attention. My property manager has been handling all that, and came back with a bid to fix the items for $1,200. I asked him to please breakdown that amount to see where the money is going, but he said the person he is working with just gave him a number for the whole deal.

Being my first experience with a property manager, I'm not sure if this is normal or they need to provide all the information concerning the work to be done. Should I have him get an itemized list from the handyman for his bid?

Thanks!