Burlington City , NJ

[Daniel Alegre]

Hello Everyone,

Ok so this is my first post despite signing up several weeks ago. I discovered Biggerpockets  while searching how to screen tenants, i came across @Brandon Turners Tenant screening: The Ultimate guide which was amazing! I was very thorough with the background checks i even went to their jobs and spoke to their managers. My tenants are two young girls and i wanted them to know how serious i was as a landlord.

To give you a little background, I am 34yrs old married with a 2.5yr old son. My wife and i have been fans of HGTV for a long time, she has always wanted rental property in places like Brussels or Paris and i always wanted property local. Once we got engaged and we were expecting we started to save hardcore for a home and after many hours of watching Income property we decided that doing a  "House Hack"(as its known around here) was the way to go. Not knowing Biggerpockets existed we kind of just searched for a multifamily house through Zillow and Trulia.  The purchase process took almost 6 months because the owner had not been paying the annual license fees and we had to go through town hearing to prove that it was a pre existing rental property. In Burlington City they do not want any new rental properties because of absentee landlords. This process would have gone much faster but the sellers thought that we would eventually buy the property as is so they never filed any paperwork and kept lying to us and hoping that we would get impatient. At one point they even had their lawyer send us a letter saying they wanted to back out of the deal until we accepted as is. Which in turn i had my lawyer write back letting them know that unless they went through with this hearing that no one would ever buy the property from them, because who is going to buy a multi-family unit that can not be legally rented out. Eventually they caved went through the meeting and when everything was done i got them to go down 10K off the asking price and pay 5K towards closing costs.

It took me about a year to fix up the rental unit. I think the biggest mistake i made was fixing our unit and the rental unit up simultaneously. I racked up 22K in CC debt and i lost a years worth of potential income. The important part is that we finally got it rented out for $1250(they pay own utilities) and my mortgage is $1433. After handing over the keys i went to work and hated being there, since then i have been obsessed with finding a way to get my next property and have spent the last couple weeks listening to podcast and reading the blogs.

One thing that i did (right or wrong) that i was really happy with was i bought my tenants flowers ( i was going to include wine but didnt want to give them the wrong idea), made a big binder with emergency numbers, long list of every nearby restaurants, local activities and even flyers to local events. We also included a welcoming card with a gift card to Wegmans. 

If you made it threw this novel thanks for reading, i look forward to learning and participating as much as possible in the future.