All Forum Posts by: David Fontaine

@David Wade  I'm currently taking this course. It's $10, but *well* worth the money, in my opinion. He even gives you spreadsheets to do the financials yourself.  

Fundamentals of Analyzing Real Estate Investments
https://www.udemy.com/course/real-estate-investment-analysis/

I have not worked with Go Property Hop, but they have a model where they do the lease *and* arbitrage. The guy who spoke at our Meetup was Evan Huynh, and he based in San Jose, CA. They seems to have a solid business model.

There are some really good points in this thread. 

(1) it's relative, $50 on $500/mo is *huge*, but on $3000/mo is less of a shock

(2) there are great tenants, good tenants, ok tenants, nightmare tenants... I have tenants who have left the place better than they found it, they never complain about anything, and fix stuff on their own. I also have tenants who always seem to have some problem: the toilet, noise from the neighbors, dogs barking, etc. If you have an A+ tenant who never complains and fixes stuff so you don't have to, that would definitely be worth $50/mo to me! But one who always needs the toilet fixed or is a constant pain will get charged more, as I'm constantly running around trying to keep them pleased and always anxious about their next complaint or demand.

You want to make sure to use treatment to kill them, not deter them. We had a problem in one of our rooms (in an SRO / shared space) and the tenant sprayed a deterrent only. This caused them to migrate through the wall into the adjacent room (we suspected through electrical sockets or something similar). We eventually were able to resolve the bed bug issue without heat treatment, but it took several applications of spray (4 or 5), and the procedure to get the room ready for spraying is quite extensive and required the tenant to perform a lot of work. PM me if you'd like to to see the process we followed.

Fire quickly, hire slowly, especially with property managers. I see no reason to continue working with this PM company. You may have to do some of the work yourself while you find a replacement property manager (ideally by going to the property yourself as someone was suggesting). Some things can be done remotely, but if you're new it can be harder. The first property manager I hired said it would cost $1500 to fix everything before putting a new tenant in place. When I asked to see the itemized list of work, it was hard to get the list. When I ultimately got it, it didn't reveal much of the work needing to be done. I started getting concerned. I had someone independent of the PM company go out and look at the property, and realized he wasn't being completely honest with me. I got rid of him. The next PM I hired said he could get the property ready for $350 and produced a Word document with pictures of everything that needed to be done. The level of service completely different. When you're in a "bad relationship" the best thing to do is breakup and move on.

VA loans are nice, but I think in most cases you're required to live in it (owner occupied). You may, however, be able to make money by house hacking. With my first house, I bought a relatively cheap house with lots of rooms and rented the other rooms out to friends. I charged a flat rate for the room, and considered it a "gross lease". I took care of the utilities, etc. The income I made covered the mortgage and even part of the utilities. I was able to build wealth by making pre-payments on the loan and building equity up really fast. Feel free to reach out to me for more detail. Cheers.