All Forum Posts by: Trae Robrock

I'm the founder of Comfortly (https://comfort.ly).

We are new, but we run our properties on them and as a remote self-manager I love it. Granted, I'm biased.

I originally built it for myself. My background is in build software, when my last company sold I got into real estate and didn't like the options.

I'd love to hear about exactly what you are looking for, even if you don't use our product.

DM me here if you are interested.

 No problem. Don't let being out of state stop you either.

All of my properties are out of state from me as well.

Good luck.

Nathan's post about finding a good PM is great. I don't use a PM for my own properties, so I don't have much experience there.

I do have experience in what's worked well for me to find good tenants.

My first rental had awful tenants. I was time pressured into picking them. I couldn't afford to not take them.

I eventually sold that property and am so happy I did.

For the next properties I set very clear screening criteria. Immovable requirements on credit score, income, and eviction history.

If I'm not getting at least 3 applicants for the property that meet those, then I lower the price.

I'd rather lower the rent to get good tenants. This is a long game for me. I raise rent annually by at least 2%, so I'll make it back eventually.

Hope this helps.

Simply no... no regrets.

I doubt I can say much that anyone else here hasn't already.

All I can say is how I thought about it and how it worked out.

When I was about to buy my first, which was across the country, I went the PM route. I called a few.

I realized a few things:
1. They didn't care about the tenant near as much as me.
2. Their cost was reasonable for the service (depending on how I valued my own time).
3. Their pricing incentivized them to turn over tenants. I wanted to keep tenants.

I've been managing two remote properties for two years now. I've had very little to deal with. What I did deal with, was easy.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply @Jeff S. luckily I'm not new to loaning money, just haven't done it in this space yet (most of mine has been in tech startups). This helped a lot.

@Michael Kinsella Thanks! That's a great idea.

Thanks, that's about what I was expecting. I wasn't sure how much offering an unsecured loan could potentially change that.

I'm about to have some cash that I plan to be lending out as hard money, this isn't something I've done much in the past and was curious if there was a good resource for finding what a "market" rate is for hard money both secured and unsecured at any given time. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm hoping someone can recommend a good bank for my Real Estate LLC. I'm going to need a separate account per property (each in it's own child LLC), so the ability to open an account quickly and easily is a plus.

Thanks. We aren't using an LLC to ensure we can get financing on the property, which I had read is hard under an LLC. Is that incorrect?