All Forum Posts by: Anna Sagatelova

@Megan Gleeson Just wanted to give you a shout out for taking a humane approach. Most investors don't.

Kerry, this is not common in my market. Not sure where you are. Here, our MA is our MA, and our listing agreement is our listing agreement.

If you sell your property while it's under management, you are technically terminating that management contract early, so they may have an early termination clause that applies.

If you are under an exclusive right to sell agreement, yes if you sell it to a tenant while under that listing agreement you do pay that broker whatever the agreed fee is. That's what makes it an exclusive right.

@Ted Lo so you want to break the lease unrelated to any Covid-19 related hardship - that's gonna be a hard sell for most managers. Why should they let you just walk away from the binding contract you signed, stating you'd occupy their unit and pay rent for x amount of time? 

Read your lease and see if it has a clause for early termination.

Section 8 in Cleveland usually means you are dealing with CMHA, and they move at their own pace. It's not unusual to wait weeks for them to schedule an inspection or re-inspection, and then a rent determination.

If you do decide to offer Section 8, you need to make sure you don't throw your screening criteria out the window. Yes, that includes credit and income - whatever the tenant's portion is, you need to ensure their income is 3x that amount (or whatever your criteria is). Screening is by far the biggest pitfall, people see a voucher and forget all about their screening criteria.

Know that Sec 8 can change the tenant's portion vs. subsidized portion any time, but will not raise the overall rent for you. Asking for a rent amount revision can actually yield you a lower rent, depending on market conditions.

You will likely be paying for water/sewer (this gets you a higher rent determination).

Be aware that CMHA will tell you which violations are tenant responsibility vs. owner. However, even if something is tenant responsibility and it doesn't get fixed, it's you, the owner, who doesn't get next month's rent payment. It's abated and forever lost. So you end up doing a lot of tenant responsibility repairs, charging them back, and hoping they pay that on top of their portion (good luck enforcing it if they don't).

At the end of the day, the analysis shifts based on which parts of Cleveland you are investing in. You can look at the HUD maximum rents based on number of bedrooms in a given zip code... if you can get more than that with an unsubsidized tenant in your neighborhood, no reason to go with Section 8 there. CMHA very rarely determines that the rent is at that HUD max amount, anyway.

@Greg M. Right but in your scenario everything stays static. And again you really aren’t factoring in all the back and forth, missed appointments, etc.

Your timeframes are unrealistic for the vast majority of investors, especially if they’re out of state or adding new properties.

If this works for you, great! You’re not our target client. But don’t pass those off as realistic timeframes.

@Greg M. with your time frames you are assuming you already have all these vendors vetted on speed dial, there is no back and forth coordinating visits, tenants not cooperating to let vendor in/not being available, no multiple bids on a project, etc. To post a property online in 5 mins you have to actually do a walkthrough, take photos (ok hire a photographer but that's not free... would be included in your PM's leasing fee), write a nice description, syndicate the posting across different rental aggregation platforms, etc.

Most investors are not in that boat and as a result your timeframes are completely inaccurate.

As a PM, I think it's great when investors with local portfolios can self-manage. I happen to operate in a market that attracts a lot of OOS investment, and many of our clients have absolutely no local knowledge of our market. We are here for investors who are not local, investors with large portfolios, investors who don't have time to vet and coordinate and manage vendors, investors who don't have the knowledge or systems to consistently screen tenants within Fair Housing, investors who are too emotionally triggered by lease violations or sob stories why the rent isn't paid, for accidental landlords, etc etc etc.

For those who are local and have a small enough portfolio to handle it themselves, I think it's a great experience and makes you a smarter investor in the long run. If your goal is to continue growing and expand outside your local market, a professional PM will add value.

@Ted Lo I'm not following how having to work from home forced you to vacate your apartment and move with your family.

@Ping W. In addition to the great advice you received above, I'll add what nobody else has mentioned: when looking for advice on how to evaluate a rental applicant in the future, don't include any information about their disabilities. It is entirely irrelevant and you should never consider it in your assessment of the applicant. Even including it in your description gives the wrong impression.

@Drew Sygit

AppFolio told us they would be working on this feature in 2017 or 18..? Nothing ever came of it.

We have had our fair share of "show AppFolio how it's done" moments ;) 

I do wish they would prioritize some other useful features, like a map of all our properties (we manage mostly SFRs and small multis), eviction tracking, etc.