All Forum Posts by: Ben Nelson

Hey all,

Im a new landlord and I was wondering if any of you knew a good source where I could familiarize myself to a descent extent on the landlord laws in new york, I have a great lawyer but would like to make sure Im doing everything by the books and not get myself into trouble!

Thanks!

For what its worth my family owns an HVAC company, you are better off going with a reliable utica boiler with a cast iron heat exchanger the amount of money you save between 85% efficiency and 97% actually isnt huge mainly because you almost never get the 97% and most people installing the super high efficiencies dont install them correctly to achieve said efficiencies. To go beyond that I do daily service calls on new tankless systems and ive torn out a number of super high efficiency boilers.

My family actually owns a number of businesses and one of them being a fireplace company. Typically if you did not like the stone you would take wire mesh and secure it as square as possible to the stone via tap cons, and you would probably have to do a few scratch coats to get things square and plum.. that is if if you have an ocd problem with things not being square and plumb like me -.- , my honest opinion would be to change the carpet not the stone, fwiw you could probably do a nice hardwood floor for a similar cost of changing the fireplace.

Yeah thats what I was thinking, thanks!

Hey all, I was just wondering if anyone has a nice spreadsheet made up to track a rental property profit and loss that breaks down all expenses and income for example expenses for PITI are broken apart. Or do most of you just use quickbooks?

Even if the numbers did pan out for these properties I wouldn't touch this with a 10 ft pole unless acquisition of the property was conditional on eviction of all tenants not paying rent on time or in full.

In my personal opinion youre looking to buy someone elses headache and the seller has even told you that! Obviously proper tenant screening can fix this but you arnt going to make any money off this deal if the tenants arnt paying (obviously).

My family owns a pretty substantial HVAC company, without seeing what needs to be done for each unit and what needs to be brought up to code on average youre going to pay 3-4k per unit, dont bite on the low ball quotes you will pay for it later on (trust me). Quality HVAC is something you want to pay for. Those are our numbers up here in NY at least and thats with TRANE units which are top of the line for the most part

This actually helps tremendously, I know that the house will sell for what it will sell for and I dont want to overpay for the house if I can get it cheaper, I just didnt know if the 20% was a thing of the past or still semi relevant.

Is there a sticky on this forum that has maybe a basic list of numbers you want to crunch to determine how profitable the investment can be other than the 50% and 2% rule?

Hey all first post here. So in short who I am, I am 23 just graduated college, ive worked for my families heating oil business since I was 16 and have spent the majority of my free time working with my dad on his rental properties.

Now I have found a property I am very interested in. Its a 4 unit all are 1 bed room and 3 of them can very easily be turned into 2 br apartments. They are asking 169,900 and my Dad traditionally has always offered 20% less than what they are asking. In this case $135,920. Now my area isnt a major city are a luxurious area, its basically an average town I would assume. Most of the houses lately in the area have been selling 120-145k but there havent really been any 4 units to compare this to. Ive read lately that most units are being sold somewhere around 98% asking price, but that also included single family homes.

So my question is how realistic is it to offer a price 20% below what they are asking in todays market? Of course I understand the house is worth not only what someone is willing to pay for it but what someone is willing to sell it for. But am I totally hopeless in todays market to look at a property like this for this price?