All Forum Posts by: Chris Gantz

@Jeremy Anhalt I agree with the advice and consensus above that you have every right to charge the tenant, and moving forward you should just add a No Smoking policy to your lease. 

That being said, @Max T. makes a good point, you’d probably be repainting anyway.

Ultimately the decision to charge depends on what you want your reputation to be as a property manager, and the policies and expectations you want to establish For future tenants. 

Our management company always tries to justify returning as much of the security deposit as possible as we’ve found this leaves tenants with a positive experience and turns into positive word of mouth.

@Luke Miller thanks for the insight, that’s a great point that I hadn’t considered. I like to think owning in the same markets I manage is a plus for my outside clients as I have “skin in the game,” to do everything I can to force appreciation and increase market values.

I can see where I’d be concerned investing with someone without that proven track record of performance as it’d be a difficult situation to ask a partner that owns the management side to be open to working with someone else.

@Greg Dickerson thanks for the advice, I agree my focus should be on syndications currently. Ultimately I’d love to be in a position where I have the success and track record for the syndicates where I could attract higher net worth clients. I don’t necessarily need to get to the point of being a GP as I imagine that’s an entirely different animal, I just want to maximize the power of OPM to grow my portfolio and management, and recognize high returns for my clients.

@Justin Tahilramani

I believe Ft McCoy is around 10,000, definitely not as large as Ft Bragg. The city of Tomah is only a population of about 10,000 though, and Ft McCoy and the other surrounding bases are one of the largest employers in the area. 

A lot of the troops that rent from us don’t have dependents as we have mostly just apartment complexes and don’t have single family homes in our portfolio there. There are private communities of single family homes that have contracts with Ft McCoy that attract more of the families, so I’m not sure how the deployments effect them.

@Chris Martin

We manage 250 units in Tomah, WI and have a huge active duty military population from Ft. McCoy.

We had a deployment in October that took 10% of our tenants and left us with that vacancy loss for a couple months. We’re still not fully leased up as they’re supposed to receive a new influx of troops in February. These are mostly young, single troops that redeploy to other bases before they go over seas.

As far as rental rates, we did not drop rates at all, we’ve found that the renters that are still around are willing to pay the higher rates. It’s entirely just an issue of not enough demand until they return.

On the flip side, typically we see an average of 3 years per military tenant so the vacancy loss is made up by the low number of turnovers over those 3 years.

@Henry Lazerow 

Areas I’ve found great multi family deals are around Tomah, Baraboo, Monroe, and the greater Madison markets. 

We don’t have anything in South East, WI, I’ve always heard the same stories and stigmas from those areas that you mentioned. I’d look around Waukesha and Brookfield areas mainly if I were to trying to get into the South East market.

Madison is growing a lot, but it’s difficult to find a decent deal on market right now. Everyone seems to be posting around 6% cap rates. Madison bedroom communities like Sauk City have a lot of untapped potential...

Thank you for the reply Greg.

In your opinion what significant benchmarks do I need to reach to be considered as having an impressive track record. 

Right now I’m at $60 Million AUM with 750 residential units and 150 storage units. I’m focused mainly on onboarding additional management clients to grow my property management business and am aiming for 1,000+ by the end of 2020. 

I’ve done a couple of syndications with friends and family, and would definitely be open to working with outside investors for the syndications. 


Do you have any advice on reaching private investors that may be interested in these syndications? 

I’ve realized up to 400% cash-on-cash return on value add deals, and I have properties that saw 15-20% increases in gross revenues just based on better management practices. 

@Arthur Panagopoulos

Wisconsin has a lot of investment from large corporations such as Foxconn, Epic, Exact Sciences, Northwestern Mutual, Oshkosh, etc that have been increasing their local workforce’s by thousands every year.

Deals can be found at 8% cap rates and every market I’m currently in has seen at least 3-5% natural appreciate, and we’ve realized force appreciation of 10-15% in some cities.

I agree in Illinois, they’re bound to be bankrupt at some point...

Iowa is a similar market to Wisconsin, I’m not sure about Minnesota.

I’m a private asset manager for a small number of clients right now and am looking to expand into a GP role to create a fund that will attract larger institutional and/or higher net worth investors.

I own and operate all management services and invest mainly in large residential complexes and storage. We have some commercial and hospitality, and are open to other asset classes, but specialize mainly in residential.

The Midwest market is highly desirable and there are plenty of great on and off market deals.

I’d be grateful for any advice and guidance from anyone that has experience building private equity funds. What steps should I take and what pitfalls should I avoid.

@Alejandro Calixto

I'm wondering how does one become a legitimate "full-time landlord".

I apologize for the lengthy post in advance, I'm new to BiggerPockets and believe this is a great tool to network and learn. 

I own a property management company that has 750 residential units under management and am a value add / buy and hold investor.

Owning real estate is absolutely the best path to financial freedom, but I think it's important to define what that means to you. The way I keep score of my "financial freedom," is based on how close the net income of my passive investments is to the profit I earn from my management company. My goal is for my passive income to outpace the earnings from my company, and at that point I'll feel I'll have "earned," that freedom. This definitely varies for everyone and depends entirely on the goals you set for yourself. For me I intend to always have my company in addition to growing my portfolio.

As far as becoming a "full time landlord," I think the best way, and quickest way to do this is to go out and start your own property management company. It's much easier to finance properties with conventional loans if you have a strong source of income. If you're only managing your own properties it will take you much longer for your income from real estate to replace your current salary/wage, and it's much harder to scale. 

Here are the bullet points I followed to start my management company:

Learn the trade.

1.Get a job with a management company, learn as much as you can about their showing, application, lease process. Learn everything you can about how their accounting is set up. Buy "Every Landlord's Legal Guide," put out by NOLO, they have a great collection of resources.

2.Take every opportunity to learn skilled trades (electrical, carpentry, plumbing, etc.) I worked construction for a year out of college and held many maintenance positions throughout college to gain these skills. Youtube is an amazing resource to learn these skills. 

3. READ. You will be amazed by how much you can learn from a good book, I have learned many creative strategies that have lead me to incredibly valuable deals just from reading. 

Time to start your own company.

1. Once I was confident I could do the job for other people I reached out to every property owner I could to let them know I could provide better service at a better rate. Researched all of the apartment complexes in your city, found out who the owners of the property are and ask them for a meeting. Rates depend on the property, for my largest clients I manage for 5% of gross, for my smallest clients its 10%. Target properties with 50-100 units to start. 

2. Hire a team. With 50-100 units you can afford to hire help. I usually hire one maintenance technician for every 50-75 units. Do as much as you can yourself, but hire your weaknesses. For our 750 units we have 12 employees. Two office staff, 8 maintenance techs, and 2 part time cleaners.

3. Property Management Software. We spend 10s of thousands on software and its worth every penny.  

4. Network - Build relationships with the best contractors, this is vital. 

Buy you own investments.

Some of my best investments have been off market deals I've purchased from my clients directly.

Hope this helps!