All Forum Posts by: Cliff H.

@Pedro Padierna I didn’t read all the posts, but the original post said everything about the neighbor and nothing about how you have advertised it? Who is your ideal tenant? How are you getting in front of them? What matter most to them in a new home? Many have the wrong idea of how to rent a unit. It’s not yard signs, but knowing your market.

Example: I survey every prospect. I also disclose there will be security cameras on site for their showing and review most video of walking throughs later. Even if you can’t hear, just seeing where folks stop and move around often tells you exactly what’s wrong with your property very quickly.

Secondly, you’re fighting Zillow: your price is above their own Zestimate and that’s the first thing I see when I click through your ad. That’s OK, so long as you’re telling folks how/why this is above average.

Lastly, inside pictures are fantastic. Outside, not so much. Too dark and looks dumpy and not because of the neighbor’s truck. Invest some dollar to up the curb appeal (grass, flowers, etc). First impressions go a long way.

Good luck!

@Lindsay Favazza great thread. Over a decade of self-managing and I’ve fallen on both sides of this question: time vs money.

As John says, if you’ve got the systems, this stuff can be low touch, but depending on where your properties are, how long you’ve been doing it, and how well you delegate, can highly determine how you can handle this.

IMHO, doing it for at least the first year will put you in a much better position to hire a good PM a year later on since you know what will make a good PM, so long as that’s not going to be burn you out or slow down your investor journey.

I’ve also managed properties in C class areas I feared for my physical safety and that’s just not worth your time. Beyond just threats of attack, managing, C’s is literally is an entire other world than ones in A or B class neighborhoods. Most landlords have never experienced that (perhaps thankfully) and it’s something you either learn very rapidly or you end up in the hospital. Is that worth it to save 10%? Not a chance.

Hire a PM because they do the things like financial reporting, tenant relations, turnover, repairs, and lease out in < 30 days better than you while you’re executing in your next deal or spending time that’s more valuable invested elsewhere. Think of these things is per/hour rates: can you make $50/hr in your day job versus $25/hour spent in PM? Then Hire the PM.

@Christopher Fordinal why are you estimating $700+/mo in cleaning? Are you turning over 8x/mo? If so, why?

@Joseph Alves, there are so many options here that I would recommend you start with a few questions to clarify what you're looking for:

1. Will you be using local storage or a cloud-based camera system?
2. Are you placing cameras in high traffic areas where accurate motion detection is needed?
3. Are you looking to integrate security cameras into a larger monitor and alert system? 
4. Are you a do-it-yourselfer or would you prefer to pay more to have someone else handle the details? 

As @Jim K. shares, SimpliSafe has been doing a ton of advertising in the home security space lately and seem like a pretty good middle ground for online security cameras and motion sensors. 

I also like Blink cameras for their battery-powered, use anywhere capabilities, however the recent Amazon buyout has led to Amazon killing off a lot of the third party integrations that made the product so useful in an overall camera config. Look for that same trend to happen to most of the smaller Internet camera companies, as Google, Amazon, and Facebook suck up all the smaller players and force you into their ecosystem. With Blink, you also need to buy aftermarket camera holders, since the ones that come in the box are easily broken or disabled. 

If you're a bit more tech-savvy, I've heard good things about Wyze cameras as well, which appear to integrate with almost every kind of hub (at present), are super affordable, and integrate door/motion/electrical sensors for basic security.  

Outside of the IP cameras, you can always fall back to local security camera systems available at your local Walmart that just store footage locally for you to review on-site. I'm not a huge fan of those, since that's then footage that can be easily destroyed or compromised by a savvy thief. 

Alternatively, if you DIY'ing your home security, just make sure it's firewalled off in a separate wireless network from your laptop/phones/etc to ensure you're not allowing bad actors to unlock your front door's smart lock by pulling access codes out of the air because you thought it was easier to have a network with no password or are still using WEP security that your neighbor's kid can crack in < 60 seconds. 

Careful, lots of misunderstanding and misinformation floating around on this. We're also at (arguably) peak SMS, since many of the robo-texting solutions are actually inducing faster progress towards flag and block mechanisms on mobile platforms. For example, iPhone users can already just send unknown text messages directly to a separate junk list, which we can reasonably assume will become a default if the current text messaging spam epidemic continues.  

Here's what the FTC says about what defines text messaging spam:

Exceptions to the law:

• Transactional or relationship types of messages. If a company has a relationship with you, it can send you things like statements or warranty information.
• Non-commercial messages. This includes political surveys or fundraising messages

Services like Call-em-all and ringless voicemail systems have been around a while and may be effective in getting a percentage of folks to call back, but tread a fine line of both legality and balancing "can versus should." 

Many of these services still ring a recipient's phone before kicking over to voicemail, which means they likely fall into the same bucket as the absurd robocall epidemic that's exploding all over the globe. Some quick facts on that:  

• 70% of consumers are now ignoring calls from numbers they don't recognize (Consumer Reports, 2019) due to a record 47.8 billion robocalls made in 2018. 
• Autodialed telemarketing calls from legitimate outfits to your home landline are legally permitted, provided the person on the other end is a human being; for prerecorded messages, your written consent is required.
• Almost all autodialed or prerecorded calls—even those from charities, political parties, etc.—made to a cell phone are illegal, per the TCPA, unless you have given your express permission beforehand to be contacted this way or the call is for an emergency.

Given that, questions I am left with:  

• How do I know if a phone number I am calling is a cell phone? 
• Do I have written consent from the user I am calling? 
• If the recipient and 20 of his/her friends setup a system to call me 2x/week as I was sitting down to dinner, would that constitute a valuable contribution to society? 

If no to any of these, why am I doing this? Listen, there are some truly legitimate reasons for using systems like these: emergency broadcasts, appointment call-backs, critical doctor reminders, etc. Unfortunately, there are far, far more annoying and (often) illegal uses that many of the self-proclaimed gurus in the industry are either not aware are a legal grey area or are intentionally keeping from us to ensure they're still selling out cheap hotels.   

So the real question on my mind is not how effective are these services at triggering a response, but why any of us would want to build a business already walking a thin line of legality and generally unwanted by 70% of the general population? 

There are a ton of ways that we, as savvy real estate investors, can leverage our deep knowledge to help folks in bad situations come to better outcome, without resorting to outbound robocalling/robo-VMing off a list bought by a local data warehouse. 

Note: I'm not making any assumptions of why anyone's doing here, but this is an area we should be helping each other recognize is a rapidly changing space, particularly with things like STIR/SHAKEN (hopefully) on the horizon to help all us better distinguish between legitimate and spoofed Robo-dialers. 

Hi @Gregory Moton have you looked at BrokrBindr (https://brokrbindr.com)? Not sure if it’s an exact fit, but the team‘s super friendly and worth an call/email to see if it might work for you.

@Liran Afergan using Beyond Pricing and it seems pretty accurate to real world pricing. AirDNA was good pre-purchase to get a feel for market pricing. AirBnB’s smart pricing is notoriously below market because AirBnB wants you rented out like a hotel every night.

There’s no right answer here. Comp shop the tools. See which make the most sense. Most offer a free trial. Others only charge based on actually bookings. Either way it’s easy to give them a test drive.

Just as with real estate, finding good comparables is the key, then work backwards from there in understanding how you’re different.

@Kerry Baird we all start in the same place, no worries there. For the comforters, I also read off AirHostsForum the recommendation to use the thinner style quilts versus the standard thick comforters (this may be what you already picked up). Quilts are far easier to clean, can be picked up at Marshalls or Ocean State pretty inexpensively, and tend to be just as warm as the Stay Puff Marshmallow comforters that would be near impossible to fit in a standard washing machine if you're changing anything over 2 beds/turnover. 

I use bulk pack lint rollers you can pick up off Amazon to collect any hair left on the beds, which is huge never-want-to-see for guests staying in your place. 

Good luck in the journey. As with anything, it's a learning experience and I continue to treat each turnover as an opportunity to tweak something in the system to make it better for my guests each time.