All Forum Posts by: Rick Bassett

It's an old thread I know but I am an investor, a property manager, and an investor-friendly realtor covering Greater New Haven. My specialty is buy, rehab and hold single-family rentals, which makes up the majority of my portfolio. But, I work with owners and investors who are involved with flipping as well.

Drop me a line if you're interested in connecting.

Rick

I am a tenured college professor and also pretty successful in REI.

I did not get a full ride and paid my way through earning BS, MS, and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science and Information Systems. College was inexpensive when I started at $3k/year for a private university. When I finished, my doctorate cost me about $55k plus the opportunity costs that others have mentioned. 

The college degrees allow me to have a steady stream of income and benefits (w-2 income, which banks love when I do deals) while giving me the flexibility to work the RE business on my own terms. 

The bottom line...college is totally worth it if you are determined to make the most of it, the major doesn't really matter if you have no plans on working a corporate job. You learn to learn, to think critically, to problem solve, to work with others if you're making use of your investment in time and money. It's not worth it if you're just going to skate by and party.

If you're serious about being successful in RE then do them both at the same time. There is no reason that you have to finish a BS/BA in 4 years, do it in 5, 6, or 7 years. Take 4 courses a semester to maintain full-time status (there are numerous benefits to that status), get a RE license as soon as possible, and start making networking inroads. Some colleges even offer the licensing courses for college credit, a nice 2-fer. Selling a few houses a year while going to school is better than working retail plus you will be learning the industry.

Starting at a 2-year community college is a smart way to go to save tuition dollars as long as you have a solid upgrade (transfer) plan to a BA/BS college/university to finish. There is nothing worse than losing credits during the transfer process.

BTW - full-ride or not, it doesn't matter if the college isn't right for you or your plan. There is nothing wrong with taking on smart-debt, us REI's do it all of the time.

I hope this helps.

@Amanda Forde

We had three or four leases that were coming up for renewal during this Covid window and had planned moderate increases for them but given everything that was going on we thought it better not to implement the small increases if it generated a chance of turnover, which quite frankly we did not want to deal with during the height of Covid.

I thought that this was going to be a real problem when it came out but it hasn't been. All tenants paid as they had before the Guv's EO. The good ones remained on time and the slower ones required the same amount of chasing.

We  successfully implemented Buildium during the COVID shutdown. We manage about 30 properties and kept putting off the expense, waiting was such a big mistake, we should've done this years ago. 

Hi All,

I am looking for an out of the box CRM system that handles 1-to-many relationships between owners and properties (1 owner, 1 or more properties). We use Buildium already (great product), I want to get something as a front-end to it. There are so many CRM products out there that I am hoping that the BP crowd can save me time by narrowing the field.

Thank You,

Rick

With the cancelations, we are converting our properties to mid-term rentals and filling them with Travel Nurses in the near term, the hospitals near us are staffing up. 

We will be paying our cleaners for at least 1 day of work per week whether they clean or not while this is going on.

Rick

We usually spend about 5k to get a 4/2 STR up and running. We buy used furniture on CL, FB Marketplace, a Hotel Liquidator store and most of the kitchen/bath/linens new on Amazon. I wouldn't overspend given the increased competition in the STR market. We buy stuff that we can liquidate without stress on CL and FB if the STR drys up.

Originally posted by@Aldo Balatti:

@Cory Macculloch  and @Luke Carl  Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

@Rick Bassett Thank you Rick for your much appreciated insight and feedback!!! It looks like you know and speak from experience and glad you could share your thoughts and experience with STR properties... I like the hybrid approach which seems to be the way to go for a long distance STR market. I do not have anytime to spend on managing the whole STR business and that was the reason I was thinking of a full turnkey STR management model.

Does anyone know or have heard of or used Evolve Vacation Rental Management services? 

Personally, I wouldn't trust a 3rd party to completely run my STR business if you were dependent upon earning 5-star reviews for future bookings. If you're in a destination place where the places rent themselves then I guess it doesn't matter. I'm not in such a place. :-)

Some people (hosts) seem to manage everything remotely just fine but after doing this locally for several years I don't see how that's possible as crazy things tend to come up during guests visits that have to be dealt with quickly or they can have a serious impact on the critically needed 5-Star guest review. 

The STR Hospitality business is 24/7/365. While I have good cleaning people, numerous handi-persons and licensed contractors, their availability is not 24/7/365 I have to pinch-hit on guest issues and repair problems when the support staff is unavailable.

We often find problems, broken, stained, damaged & missing items, during turnovers that have to be dealt with quickly. Think about the timing of this scenario (there are many): current guest checks out at 11 am and next guest is arriving in at 3 pm, the cleaning person who starts cleaning at 11 am discovers a broken kitchen faucet or a running toilet around 11:45 am. If the problem is communicated quickly that gives just 3 hrs and 15 mins to solve it and perform clean up around it. That is very difficult to do in the best cases and even harder to do remotely.

I'm an advocate a hybrid approach for remote ownership; using a local PM for the on the ground stuff but owning all of the guest interactions via the app. We intend to buy other STR's in other markets and will handle it this way.

We do our own property management on our units and perform pm services for other hosts in Greater New Haven as their boots on the ground. Our pm rates vary based on the level of involvement that our host clients want to have.