All Forum Posts by: Dave Poeppelmeier

Hi Blake, my question is why are these popping up left and right? Student Housing has been in HUGE demand by investors here in Toledo. Being in Student Housing myself, I find more students are looking for houses instead of apts and dorms due to Covid right now. See what their occupancy is (which you would do anyway) and if the building is only half full, there's your answer. I would also know the general financial health of the College/University you're investing around. If it's small and it's not guaranteed to get through this Covid slump then I would take pause and assess if you could rent these apartments to non-students. But if all of the numbers work and the building is pretty much full, go for it.

Usually yes. If a tenant is damaging property, causing safety issues, drugs, etc  that violates your lease you can still file an eviction on those counts. But, you have to make your way through a bogged down court system. 

If you are in a "College Town" where the town's survival is based on the College/University, you are more exposed to risk associated with a market crash/recession, initially. The initial reaction will be to drop out of school for those who's parents lost jobs, didn't want to be there in the first place, etc, but what we usually see is people go back to school to earn a different/higher degree during recessions instead of trying to get into the work force. If your school is in a large Metro area, you should be fine even if you have to drop your rent a little and rent to normal residents for a time until the initial shock wears off. 

We used to use Cozy prior to having a Bookkeeper who uses Rent Manager, but otherwise you can just use Venmo/CashApp/etc for easy online payments. Whatever you use, just be clear it's the one they have to use. The big thing is they need to be able to have a checking account for the ACH transfer. 

Well, first and foremost, if you think the Students are "little bastards" then don't invest in Student Housing. I have found that Students treat my houses better than regular residents, especially since I give them a nice house to live in. Do you plan on self-managing or hiring Property Management? If you live in Morgantown then great, but there's no way you're going to be able to manage in Huntington, just looking at a map. The biggest thing is you need to know the culture of the college/university and it's housing market. When is the rental season? What do the students/owner pay for? Is one street a party street and one street over it's not student housing anymore? That will go a long way to being successful in Student Housing. 

No, here in Toledo Republic has the big thick individual cans for the trucks with the lift on them. They actually do a pretty good job with pickup, but they won't take your trash if you don't have a can. Hence, pain in people's butt if they get stolen because now you have trash piling up, and rats come in, etc etc. 

@Christopher B. Yep, we have to do that too. It gets fixed, it's just one of those "Really?!?" issues

Question for those in Property Management: What is the deal with the big lift-type trash cans getting stolen? We are still literally digging out some streets here in Toledo from the snow this week, and we've had several complaints from people getting their trash cans stolen. Seriously people... Anyone else seeing this? 

You need a Property Manager when you can't/don't want to do it anymore. I would suggest everyone do their own Property Management if you're buying locally to see what it takes to run a property. If you like it, great, do your research and get "good" at being a Property Manager. If you aren't a people person, if you don't like talking to your tenants, don't want to do the screening or coordinating repairs or all of the other things needed to run a property correctly, find a Property Manager. Otherwise you're going to lose more money in unhappy tenants, deferred maintenance that turns into costly emergency repairs, etc than what you'll pay for a PM. Now, at the same time, you need to find a PM who knows what they're doing. There's plenty of bad PM people/companies out there. There are tons of great threads/articles here on BP on how to find a good PM.

It all depends in how much you trust your contractor. If it's someone new and I'm familiar with what they will need, I will try to get the material. But, I'm super busy and don't have a truck (I've had more than one person tell me in the Home Depot loading area "Son, you need a truck!") so I'm willing to pay for the convenience of having my contractors get the material that they know and need. I have a great Roofer but he insists I get everything he needs. I am not a roofer and have no idea what he needs despite having a list, and last time it was a disaster and I wasted so much money in truck fees to deliver and return said wrong materials. I love the idea of giving someone a Commercial Home Depot card, or Home Depot can do Phone Sales where they can call you and you can give your Pro phone # and a CC.