All Forum Posts by: Brad Braun

@Landon Rasmussen Yes we give out our cell number to all of our renters. Even the crazy ones. We also set expectations that you are omly going to speak to me during business hours. If theres an emergency, I ask them to call and leave a message, especially with photos, and I'll judge if I need to call you back or not. Ive never been too incovienenced by my renters.

A guy and his brother here in town were doing this exact same thing when the feds came knocking on their door.  They had effectively swindled mortgage companies out of 45 million at the time of their arrests.  I'm pretty sure one got 14 years in prison and the other one got 6.  Here's the article if you want to see how, what, why they did to get their prison sentences.

Summerville man arrested in mortgage frauds.

Our family owns and manages 27 homes/units with 13 of those in a mobile home parks we own.  We had an additional 12 last year but sold the property to a commercial investor.  We also manage another 15 short and long term rentals for other people and collect a commission on those properties as well.

That does seem a bit careless to say the least.  I use a totally random number that I memorized years ago and has nothing to do with my birthday, ssn, or any other combination that's related to me.  I feel that if someone were to figure it out, they'd have to be really good or really lucky.  I do however use the same code for all of my combo boxes as I feel it would take a mastermind to figure it out..

Mindy, just curious, how many homes have you been to recently that were broken into by the seller using the methods you've listed above?  Is that a problem in your area, where you have a group of savvy thieves out there?  We don't seem to have a problem here and I've always used the same code on my lockbox, but you bring up a good point, perhaps there's a group of Codebreakers out there that spend their time figuring these lockboxes out.  We use combo doors on our rental properties and those codes get changed weekly, I've luckily never had a break-in to this point.

How much commission are you wanting to pay your PM for managing your property?  Is their commission included in your rent amount?  If so, could you put up with managing the property yourself in order to save that percentage?  This might allow you to lower your rent some to become more competitive.  Also, when dealing with renters, most don't care if you have fancy yards, nice appliances, etc in my opinion, cheaper rent wins out almost every time.  Unless you have an amazing benefit of why they should pay you more, you're going to get skipped over for the lower rent properties.  Try reevaluating why someone would pay more for your place, and really advertise those features to justify you asking a bit more, and find a way to get your pricing to a more competitive level.

I've used cvh360.com in the past.  Their photographer has about 18 years experience photographing/videoing real estate propperties. 

Call me crazy, but we don't do over the top. We are clean freaks and we inspect each home after each rental is complete, we make sure everything is maintained and working, or if it breaks during their stay, we get right on it, but I've found in our market, clean means rentals.  Adding a bag of potato chips or a gift basket wouldn't do anything to add more renters to the pot.  We are typically booked at  least a year in advance.  For repeat customers, I always give them a rate reduction and will sometimes send them a bottle of wine or something, but for the most part we keep it simple.

Charleston, and especially Berkeley County is in an epic boom. We have many wonderful investment opportunities. Days on market in most areas is under 10 days, and at 46 days for the entire tri-county area. I read that the Charleston metro is gaining 56 families per day, that equals a low supply and high demand. Good time to be an investor here. There's plenty of cash out there already looking for the same deals, and homes are selling for 97% of asking MLS wide, so deals are getting harder and harder to come by, if you're looking for tenants, there's like a never ending supply it seems.

Hi, we own a property management company and manage 15 properties that we list on VRBO.com.  These are weekly beachfront rentals ranging from $200 per week up to $8000 per week for the larger properties.  

Pros:  Steady influx of renters, I am able to keep most of my properties full during the summer/spring seasons.  In fact, on the larger properties I'm booked a year in advance.

Most of the transactions are done  via email and rarely do I meet/speak to the tenants unless there's a maintenance issue.

Cons:  SCAMS!  It seems like once a month I get a phone call from someone wanting to verify if I'm posting my properties somewhere (even on VRBO), I have had a few prospective tenants that lost their money due to being scammed.  I've had renters show up at my properties to rent and have to be told they got scammed.  VRBO will remove fake posts if alerted to them, but they're not the most pro-active at policing them.

VRBO can be a good source of tenants, make sure you have very good photos, as your photos can be the difference between someone renting from you and from the next property on the list.