All Forum Posts by: Mike D.

I had a 75 gallon gas water heater go out last week. The hot stack cost $850 at Menards. The newer water heater is a power vent unit ($1300) that requires PVC vents to the roof/wall and a 115VAC outlet for the blower. The cost with install will probably be double the old unit.

If you have an old water heater now is the time to replace it while the hot stack are still available!

I have a couple tenants who, after deducting damages from their deposits, owe a couple hundred dollars. One is less than $100, the other is around $200.

I don't think it's worth going through the court system to get judgments. The filing fee is more than the amount owed on one of the debts.

Are there debt collectors that take on small amounts? Or is there a way to report the debts to the credit agencies?

Any other suggestions would be great.

Thanks

If you're getting the labor for FREE, then invest the savings in quality paint! You're saving a ton of money not paying for painters!

Isn't it 7% off the top? 3% for the listing agency, 3% for the buyers agency and 1% to the MLS? I think if you have a nice house that's ready to sell in a desirable neighborhood you should be able to market it on FSBO websites with no problem. We posted our home on craigslist earlier this year and had a signed offer 2 weeks later. I think it's worth giving it a shot yourself first. We hired a RE lawyer for $500 to make sure we did the legal paperwork correctly. We did have to find our own comps on the assessor website but the FSBOs also offer that service.

Can you multifamily investors name some advantages / disadvantages of both types of complexes? I hear 2BRs tenants tend to stay longer but I also get a lot of calls for people looking for 1BRs.

Thoughts?

 Same here. I schedule 2 showings usually at different times of the day. I get the person's first name and number and call them the day of the showing to confirm their appointment. I've saved a lot of time since doing this.

I would avoid section 8 unless you are having problems with vacancy. Around here the housing office won't allow landlords to charge more than market rents or more than they are charging for other units in the building. 

And even if you find a tenant with a criminal free background chances are their friends/relatives they associate with have scary backgrounds. My experience is they take a lot more management, cause more issues with their neighbors and cause more damage to their apartment. And they are much harder to get money out later on than somebody with garnishable wages.

Why did they sell their house if they have all this extra cash? Sounds like they're hiding something.

One more thing Rebecca, if I were you I'd jump on getting this done as soon as possible so you can get it all recorded by the end of this year. If the county assessor doesn't see your building in a cooperative on Jan 1, 2015, you'll be assessed the commercial rate for 2015 and have to wait another whole year before the reduced taxes kick in.

Rebecca,

You might consider setting up a condo regime instead of a cooperative. I have 4 plexes in both entities and if it was an option I'd put everything under a condo regime due to less paperwork and tax headaches. 

Some cities like Marion put the kibash on condo conversions to try and stop the tax revenue bleeding, but last I heard Cedar Rapids still allows condos. You may want to ask your attorney about that. Shuttleworth and Ingersoll are very knowledgeable in both areas and they will give you a handout with the pros and cons of each.

The cooperative cost me about $2k to set up plus $600 for an architect to produce engineering drawings of the building. Also, instead of using two natural people in the cooperative my attorney told me you could also have yourself as one member and a single member LLC as the other member (you being the sole LLC member) and it would still be legal. That way you would not have to bring anyone else into the ownership if you didn't want to.

Another benefit of cooperative/condo is it seems to raise the value of the building. One of my appraisals added $10k in value to the 4 plex simply because it was in a cooperative.

Good luck!

Mike