All Forum Posts by: Alexander Kleyman

Not taking sides on pro or against the issue at hand ... but grounds for discrimination would be based on what reason you gave for rejection. If you could not verify employment and verify W2s that would be a very legit reason. If you have a set and written minimum requirements criteria and the potential tenant can not fulfill all the check boxes, it’s not a discrimination.

I am interested to hear more details on this too.

I was told by my lender that 10% is minimum, as long as it is a certain distance away, “is in a justified vacation location” ie. not another home in a major metro area, and you will spend a minimum # of days residing there.

Also note that PMI will be added on anything less then 20% down payment.

My CPA is Carolyn Friend & Associates.

www.friendandassociatesmi.com

Located in Wixom MI

PM me if you want her contact info.

She has an investment property herself so she understands our business. Besides that she is very diligent and yet easy to talk to.

Roy I have a property just like you describe - SFH that's been converted into a "Duplex". Downstairs and upstairs apartments are separate units. It does cash flow better then a SFH, you are correct.

In my case:

- it had to be re-zoned as MF with the city

- an additional post office address had to setup (1A, 2B)

- natural gas line was split and 2nd meter was added

- 2nd electrical meter was added outside

- 2nd electrical circuit breaker panel was added in the basement next to the other panel, and all the wiring for upstairs unit was moved into it

- city does not allow for a split up of incoming water to add 2nd meter so both units have to share it. I pay for water&sewer and charge each tenant $25/month on top of rent cost.

- internal water pipes in the basement were split downstream of the water meter and 2nd hot water heater was added.

If you have any more questions let me know.

I just switched to using Stessa myself. It’s free, has a web and iOS App interfaces, but besides that I like it’s simple yet detailed interface. It interfaces with my bank with no issues and loads all the transactions. Report generation is detailed as well. For now the “big brand” services mentioned by others are too much and too $$$ for me, until I grow my portfolio significantly.

I self manage and use Google Voice and like it. Sound quality is good, VM transcribes messages to text/email so I can read them and archive them if needed. It also allows configuration of your account, I setup my “business hours” so calls between 6pm - 8am get routed straight to VM. This saves me from being bothered by calls and I can review VM at leisure.

I pay for Microsoft Office 365 family license and included with it is 6 accounts to MS OneDrive cloud with 1GB storage each. It’s only $100/yr so having Office license and 6GB of cloud storage is a good value IMO.

Look into Innago.com it offers free digital lease signing. I too just started to “play” around with it recently. With Innago you upload a PDF of your lease and overlay it with marked data entry fields such dates/$$$/initials/signatures for landlord and tenants.

@Ben Steever

For normal Google/Gmail accounts Google Voice is free.

However if you have a (paid) Google Suite service to use your Google to host your domain’s email, then you are forced to subscribe to a Google Voice “Starter” subscription which cost $10/month and supports up to 10 users.

So it’s been some time, almost 2 months...! and I have an update: I am happy to report that yesterday we finally closed on this property. Congrats to us for acquiring our first rental property!

It turned out that there was no funny business going on, just disorganized the sellers. The property was an estate being sold by 2 or 3 kids of a deceased parent living in multiple states. Ran into hick-ups with improperly setup estate documentation, quitclaim deed rights, even a local court judge had to get involved to sort out the documents just days before our closing. We as buyers just remained patient and waited out all the issues and they arose and resolved on almost weekly basis lol.