All Forum Posts by: Calvin Thomas

Don’t put in electric baseboard heaters. We manage hundreds of units. Several with baseboard heaters. Those leases are never renewed due to the high usage cost. $800 electric bill for 800 sqft place is not uncommon. Tenants simply can’t afford them and move out. Sometimes in the middle of January breaking their lease. Unless you have some super air tight triple pane windowed studio with 8” thick walls you need something else. Gas is usually cheap to run. If it’s a small place mini splits work well.

Don’t fall victim to the siren song of cheap baseboard heaters to be drown by crashing waves of KWH.

I own a duplex in Fayetteville Arkansas and the city is buying part of my backyard to add a trail which connects to a great local park. As part of the deal, they are paying me to take some of the backyard. It's a large yard that overlooks trees and such. I thought a great value add would be to add a fence to buy units (with a divider).

I'm trying to decide what the best kind of fence would be: pine vs powder coated chain link? They are about the same cost (which surprised me) but for a rental property that is really probably mostly for pets, I'm concerned about maintenance and upkeep. Has anyone had any success of failures with picking the wrong kind of fence for their property? Any insight would be great.

Quote from @Calvin Thomas:

If it's well insulated, then the gas costs would also be cheaper. And just because electric is mandated on new buildings doesn't mean it is a cheaper utility. It's a ridiculous mandate by the legislators who thinks they'll save the environment on the back of tax payers.

my point stands. I think it will cost more to heat with electric, which will drive down his rent rates and hurt his bottom line.

Quote from @Calvin Thomas:

Isn't electric a lot more expensive? From what I remember, and what I'm reading online right now, electric heat can cost 3x as much as natural gas. And that's after paying to replace the existing system with electric baseboard.

Currently we do not pay anybody's heat or hot water.  In every building, that we bought that had common heat and hot water, we seperated those units on to their own devices.  The exception being condos where the common heat was not in our control.  We have installed gas hot air furnaces, gas hot water boilers, and heat pumps.  All of thoise are more expensive to install that electric baseboard but have much lower operation costs.  We're in it for the long haul, we want tenants to stay a long time and reduce vacancy.  We've had 30 year tenants, and currently have a 25 year tenant, and several 10 year tenants.  Our average tenancy is 12.5 years.

Hi all,

My wife and I have worked over the last 7 years to build a rental portfolio and are getting to the point where the bookkeeping/data entry tasks are becoming too time consuming. Would love to have a reliable person to help free up some of our time to focus on growing the business. We currently use a mix of apartments.com/Rentmanager to record transactions. Free ACH rent collection on apartments.com and Rentmanager for the accounting elements. I have heard mixed reviews on virtual bookkeepers and would be open to hiring a domestic bookkeeper as well. Any suggestions on where to look? I have searched fiver/upwork and posted in RM forums.

Thanks so much!

Great idea, I thought about mini splits for each unit but that would be about $17-$20k and wouldn't be worth it. I would need to make sure there would be enough power for each unit to run baseboards. Thank you for the suggestion.

Hi all, my wife and I, after many years of analyzing, finally purchased an 4 unit apartment in western NY. Now that we are deep into the winter months we have noticed our heating bill (gas) continue to go up, our latest bill is over $400. We have a single boiler system with four zones and looking for advise or suggestions to lower the gas usage.  One thought was to move the thermostats from the apartments to a single conditioned space and place temperature monitors in each unit to make sure the apartments are at a comfortable level. We are not sure if one apartment or some are leaving windows open of if something else is happening. We have sent letters to each tenant asking them to be mindful and, if needed, to let us know if they have a maintenance issues with a window or door. Has anyone done this? Is there any other suggestions you may have?

Thank you

Jim 

Assuming you go the HELOC route, another option to reduce your costs assuming you have decent credit is to look at credit card balance transfer promotions.

Back in 2003-2004 I had HELOCs on my investment properties and interest rates were increasing. I was also getting credit card balance transfer offers at 0% promotional rates for a year to a year and a half and I started transferring my HELOC balances to the promotional credit cards. It saved my quite a bit on interest costs. Short term my credit score did take a hit, but once the promotional transfers were paid off, my score jumped higher than it was before.

These days, the "pure" zero percent transfers don't seem to be around anymore as they typically charge a 3-5% balance transfer fee as part of the promotion, but this is still better than current HELOC rates. Obviously if you go this route you need to be very attentive and make sure to zero out the credit cards as the promotion ends. It is something you don't want to try if you are not sure you have the liquidity to make this happen.

Does anybody have recommendations on the various alternatives to requiring a full security deposit?

I know there is surety bond process and there a a few companies that appear to offer a service (Like Rhino)

Furnished Finder has a new feature called Worry Free Waivers but when I tried  to better understand their process, it was clear they have not done a good job of vetting this out.  They have outsourced the entire process to WAIMO which appears sketchy. 

Full security deposit for a three month MTR is causing me to lose business and I need an alternative!