All Forum Posts by: Mike D.

I would raise the rent for sure. That's $2500/year that you're missing out on. Maybe give him a 2-3 month notice so he has time to mull it over and possibly stay.

Hey Thomas, don't forget insurance and property taxes. And if you end up buying this place I would recommend putting the property into a housing cooperative to cut your property taxes way down.

I actually own 3 four plexes in that area feel free to message me if you want to discuss anything.

Mike

 I actually have a notebook in my car. Whenever I see a property I'm interested in I write the address down in the notebook. Then I look up the owner on the county assessor website and find the owner's name/address through a combination of whitepages.com or any mortgages they recorded at the county recorder. One time I paid peoplefinder.com a few dollars to get a bunch of addresses much faster.

It took a while to do this but there were only about 40 of them and then I put the addresses and properties in an Access database. There were several non deliverable addresses. Some of properties the only person listed on the documents was the attorney, so I just sent the letter to the attorney.

I would put up with it for 3 more months and give them the standard 30 day no renewal notice due to chronic late payments. Probably not worth the hassle of an eviction at this point.

My main criteria was the type of building I was interested in, which at the time was 4-8 plex apartments built 1970 or newer. So my letter just said I'm interested in the type of property you own on such and such Street would you consider selling at this time. I also mentioned some of my multi-family experience and that I was pre-qualified with a bank. 

These were letters to multifamily owners, not single family homeowners like wholesalers look for.

I've had success sending just a simple note on white paper to property owners. 

One year I sent out about 40 letters to owners in my area and had about 10 responses. Some were curious to know what I was looking for, some emailed me to tell me they weren't interested in selling, but one of them actually sold me his property. There were two other fairly serious sellers that I negotiated with but we couldn't agree on a price. If nothing else it was a great way to meet experienced investors.

Direct mail is my favorite way to find sellers. There's no competing with other buyers on the MLS and no dealing with high pressure real-tors.

I see a lot of 1900's houses in the ghetto that are cash flow cows and would easily hit the 2% rule. But good luck keeping those places full of tenants who pay on time and don't cause any problems.

I've been using Mr Landlord.com for about 4 years and am really happy with them. They give you a report of evictions, all open and closed credit accounts and the payment histories on all the accounts. Also they check for eviction and money judgements and verify the address the applicant provides. It costs about $15 per credit check and the report is returned in about 1 minute.

https://www.aoausa.com/mrlandlord.html

I used to have a CHevy 2500 but it was a gas hog, insurance, upkeep and taxes were expensive and it took up a lot of room. Now I use a 5 x 8 utility trailer I can tow with my car. It does everything I used the truck for but much less money.

Don't accept people with evictions. Run credit checks and look for a pattern of late payments and judgments from landlords. Most people will let their department store credit card lapse before they stop paying rent.

I also require that people completely fill out the application and MAIL it in. Too often the people standing there with the cash deposit are trying to break a lease or have been kicked out.