All Forum Posts by: Marcus Auerbach

@James W. I wouldnt do it. The underlying issue is that they dont play by the rules and you keep bending them in their favor. Tell's me you are a reasonable guy, but be aware that every time you do this they are encouraged to take it a step further next time.

@Jim Wollmer you've got great opportunities right on your doorsteps! You need a thick skin to play in the D class market and you definitley earn have to earn your cashflow the hard way. By no means this is a passive investment. Property Managers are not the answer either: hard enough to find a good one in the first place and even they will not take care of your investment as you would (after all for them it's $100 revenue on the line (monthly), for you its $50,000 or $100,000 of YOUR skin - that makes a difference). Don't even get me started on pig-properties in 30k neighborhoods - they will need a 10k roof at some point or a sewer line and a $30k interior makeover and you will have no property value to support it because no matter how nice your house is the 'hood will dictate the price. Do yourself a favor, play it conservative with your first properties: buy something that close by in a market you actually understand and pick a property where you can ad real value fixing it up and you know it will be easy to sell if you should decide at one point landlording is not for you. Sorry for smacking you with a 2x4 but you asked for opinions LOL. Giving up a couple hundret bucks in monthly cashflow is a thoretical loss, because you quickly burn it up spening hours driving arround takeing care of issues, not even mentioning the emotional pain you could potentially get yourself into dealing with people who just happen to live in a D class area..

Postlets works great and I have received 7 inquires in the last 24 hours. I have pretty high qualification criteria and we will see how the quality is, but from what I can see in the inquires I expect quite good. This makes it a clearly better choice compared to craigslist. I have started playing with facbook boosted posts and ads and I am finding this the least productive. Yard signs always yield a ton of calls, but very random quality and I have stopped using them alltogether. Talking to a few people in the last days it seems like October is generally busier than September. 

I would like to hear from my fellow investors in Milwaukee or Wisconsin how they are seaing seasonality. How big of a swing do you see? How is the market for you right now?

@Marina Shlomov I set up a postlet yesterday night and found it super easy to do. They use a lot of checkboxes which makes it very searchable for aplicants looking for certain criteria.

I am big about great pictures and I dont have much of this particular property (didn't stick to my process, we were moving contractors out same day as tenants moved in), but this weekend it will be vacant and I will bring the fisheye and get some more material for postlets. They also have a video walk arround ap which I will definitley try. Thanks again for the idea, I'll let you know if it makes a difference.

@Brian Karlow that's a great point and I have tried it before with Q4 leases and structured them so they come due in spring or summer - I had the same experience as you, no issue for the tenants - it's also in their best interest to move in spring or summer: nobody in his right mind volunteers for moving during the winter in Wisconsin. Thanks for the reminder, it's been a while since I had to do that.

@Marina Shlomov - great advice, it makes perfect sense - I'll definitely try that tonight. Craigslist has spoiled me a little bit the last year, so I never had a reason to explore something else. My natural target audience is paying premium rents for nice homes and are somewhere in the area between blue collar and white collar. I have noticed that professional pictures make a huge difference if you want to appeal to a certain audience, portlets.com probably allows for a nicer presentation if I remember correctly. Now I know what I am going to be doing after dinner...

To be blunt: if the house is only worth 45k forget it. You are quickly in the $15-25k area to replace the wall, depending on project scope and size. Sounds like you can't use an excavator, so all manual labor.  They would have to shore the dirt to keep it from coming into the basement when removing block, possible replace drain tile etc. Most important is always to remove the root cause: in this case ensure proper pitch of the driveway away from your house;  reality is often the driveway is pitched correctly - away from THEIR house. 

Well said @Joshua Woolls

Well said, I could not agree more, there is a social responsibility that comes with holding properties. In return for growing our business we owe it to the people in neighborhoods that we invest in. Properties rented in distressed condition are an eyesore and the owner is not only milking his property but is also milking the neighborhood. There is nothing sustainable about it and there is no value created for the society, in fact it's a parasitic behaviour. I disrespect people who don't take their social responsibilities serious and I am not holding back when I have a chance to tell them.  

I start to pay a lot more attention to seasonality of the rental demand and I am wondering what the Milwaukee BP comunity is seeing. Looking back this year typically I always had one single family house for rent, either because we just finished rehab or because someone is moving. Most of my advertising is on craigslist and I started seeing demand go up quite a bit in spring, typically I would get about one email a day. Not much of a surpirse demand kept going up as days got longer and in June/July I was seeing sometimes 5 emails a day and had a home rented within a week. I ended up renting a house that we just started demolition on - talk about a hot market. Now here we are in September and things are slowing down fast -  I am down to 3 emails a week. What are you guys seeing?