Real Estate Investor · Unionville, CT · Member since 2016 · 260 posts · 167 votes
7y
@Cameron Riley I use cozy for listing my rentals and application data collection. Their background check results always miss criminal activity in my state I have to check the judicial site and google this names for this info. I haven’t used it for rent collection.
Lender · Newark, NJ · Member since 2016 · 695 posts · 252 votes
7y
I use Cozy for some of my tenants, only concern i have is the delay in processing the payment to your bank account. it can take up to 5 business days. other than that i like the app.
I have had troubles keeping track of all my rental income and rental expenses.
Should I just learn excel?
- What do you recommend? I know you mentioned some things but what will help me perfect “ book-keeping “
I don’t even know how much exact dollars came in from my investments, due to lack of software and such! I’m a mess right now
Cameron, I'm not saying I'm the best bookkeeper, I contemplate outsourcing my bookkeeping every once in a while. But, if you're going to do it find what works for you. You can use Excel, but it'll be all manual with a small learning curve. I think of myself as good with Excel, but I prefer automation and syncing my bank accounts with a program.
I do use Excel for a static estimator. I've built my own quad chart and offer calculator that gives me a good idea what my cash-on-cash return is. I also use Excel to teach rehab budgets. But in all cases, I also have each transaction categorized in Rentec, which will spit out a Schedule E for my accountant, profit/loss statements for lenders/property owners, etc.
Investor · Chattanooga, TN · Member since 2016 · 146 posts · 108 votes
7y
Cozy is good for what it does basically rent collections and very very basic accounting. When I started I used Cozy, Zillow for listings, and excel spreadsheets for book keeping, and google voice/hangouts dialer to communicate. But after I passed 24 units I needed something with everything in the same place. So I switched to Buildium. It’s not free like all the others but it is worth it for sure when you self manage a good amount of units.
Great Falls, MT · Member since 2017 · 97 posts · 172 votes
7y
@Cameron Riley
I was old school - all paper for 13 years! Then I was moved across the country with the military, and had to figure out a more hands-off system. Learned about Cozy on a military landlords forum.
I transitioned to it as we bought new properties and tenants moved. I love it for several reasons:
It’s free; it stores your listing photos and narrative, so reposting is vey easy; it stores all application, credit/background reports on all tenants; it’s easy to look-up past rents received for accounting purposes; you can set-up email notifications to let you know when rent has been initiated; tenants can pay with several methods which cost you nothing and keeps you out of their financial chaos; tenants pay for app fees, credit/background reports through the site, so you don’t need to collect money; and it’s made it so I (and the tenant) can do EVERYTHING from anywhere in the world.
There are some things that I don’t love.
I’ve heard mixed reviews on the background portion. Some in other forums report it missing big stuff. Mine have all come back clean (other than minor things). I’m not sure if that’s due to it being incomplete or the fact that we get A/B class tenants??? If you cater to C/D class tenants; I’d do more investigating.
I also don’t like it’s “syndication” option for listings. But I’m spoiled....I list on Craigslist and AHRN and find great people easily. I tried syndicating (I think Zillow, Hotpads, and Realtor.com) through Cozy and was scammed several times. We had tenants calling my husband’s work (this number wasn’t listed anywhere), showing up at the property when we didn’t list the address, and we got calls 4 months after I’d removed the listing. It was like the wild-wild-west and I will not do that again!
Also, you can only send notifications to one email. I called to see if I could add my husband so we are on the same page about payments, but it’s not an option. So, probably not great if you work in a team.
In regard to accounting....hire a CPA who uses Quickbooks online. They usually have someone who will teach you to use it in a couple hours (cost me $300). It links to your bank account, and your CPA can login to fix anything you mess up or aren’t sure how to allocate. I was skeptical, because I had a system (much more time consuming), but it’s been a good move.
@Cameron Riley Cloud storage with easy access from PCs, Macs and mobile devices. I think I pay $100 per year for 100GB. Love being able to look at any document or pic etc. I need to from a mobile phone.
If you're a Macintosh user, iCloud has the same functionality for all apple devices.
Rental Property Investor · Cleveland, OH · Member since 2016 · 653 posts · 769 votes
7y
I use Cozy and think it's great for all the basics. I self manage a portfolio o 7 units and it's definitely made my life easier. Plus, tenants like seeing some new technology since I'm in a market where property management is pretty far behind in technology. Being able to easily text applications and setup instructions from my phone is awesome! But there are a few advanced features missing that may be crucial when I have more units.
Rental Property Investor · Fort Wayne, IN · Member since 2016 · 258 posts · 177 votes
7y
@Cameron Riley I use buildium.com for my property management and this is all in one cloud based software and reasonably priced and has all kind of features and keep improving the software every day.
Investor · Buffalo, NY · Member since 2016 · 74 posts · 29 votes
7y
@Cameron Riley I handle all the marketing and community related initiatives, so yes.
@Adam Wigdorski we've had that happen a few times where we run into people locally who use us and had no idea we were local to Buffalo. I just looked up your friend Brian on Facebook. My best guess is he might be a former Marine with our CEO Steve White. I know there are a lot of COs who formerly served with Steve.
Rental Property Investor · NY · Member since 2017 · 132 posts · 90 votes
7y
@Cameron Riley
I’d strongly recommend rentprep for one solid reason. They actually call the employers , references, and past landlords. All included in the report. I’ll use them for life.
Most of my tenants want to text everything. I give them a Google Voice number and it goes to my personal phone.
They also don’t like to use property management software for maintenance issues so they send me texts with pictures of any issues.
That's awesome. I had a Google Voice number many years ago that expired due to lack of use.
Curious, would I be able to have calls and texts to a Google Voice # forwarded to a international (South Korea) number?
The text portion of Google voice just uses data to send and you view the messages in the app. So I know that would work anywhere. It also sends the texts to my gmail account (it is optional). I like that because I can archive messages. As far as voice calls, I have mine setup to forward to two USA phone numbers (could do more). The cool thing is that both phones ring when a call comes in, so if you shared support of the business between multiple people, they can all field calls. They can also all see text messages and voice mails. I am not sure about forwarding to a South Korea number, but I can answer phone calls with my computer, which only has an internet connection. Maybe in your case use a computer for calls and try to stick to texts for everything else.