All Forum Posts by: Dmitry Semenov

Pellego has low monthly fees and most agents there are investors, definitely worth checking out.

Disclaimer: I hang my license in Pellego, I am also a local investor that uses license mostly for my own investment purposes.

Whoever you choose - do not agree on one year contract with early termination fee. Negotiate 30 day termination without any early termination fees.

Many things could go wrong, you don't want to be tied to bad property manager.

If you are interested to join investor focused brokerage - check out Pellego.

Chair of Sustainability and Renter's committee is socialist whose goal is to abolish private property. I watched a couple of Seattle City Council meetings recently (e.g. one where 10 months eviction ban was discussed), they are unstoppable. I will not be surprised that Seattle will ban using credit reports and credit score next, expand eviction ban next year and will continue all of this nonsense.

I use Cozy for self-managed units. Tenants didn't have problems setting payments with it.

I also worked with Buildium and PropertyWare as a property manager client. I like Buildium a lot, I had zero issues getting up-to-date reports whenever I want, and I don't need to wait PM to send me monthly report and then ask them to fix issues discrepancies.

PM that used PropertyWare were sending me monthly report, and for whatever reason it was off every month. E.g. ending March balance was not equal to beginning April balance. But that might be the problem of that particular PM, not PropertyWare itself.

Also keep in mind that mobile home itself loses value with time, like car (I am assuming you don't own the land in this case).

Search for "Addicted to ROI" meetup organized by Jennifer Beadles.
They also created https://agentsinvest.com/ platform for out of state investors.

I did 2 evictions (placed by the same property manager, lol). The first one was handled by Loeffler Law Group, second one - Dimensions Law Group. I can recommend both. I would not try to do eviction myself, there are so many things that could go wrong and you'll have to restart this process again (in the best case) or will have to pay fines (in a worse case).

Total eviction cost depends on many factors, e.g. if you need to go to the court or tenant settles, default judgement vs hearing, etc. In my case, we could negotiate with the tenant and eviction didn't cost too much. You can request price sheet from both companies and compare.

Another company, which I didn't use personally, but was recommended by several people I know - LT Services.

+1 for RHAWA membership. It costs about 200/year, but you'll get resource desk, which respond in 24 hours and would cover a lot non-trivial questions. Plus lease for WA and Seattle, and a bunch of addenda. Plus a lot of online classes about landlord-tenant law, about operating rentals, and investments in general. Plus forum. Totally worth it.

Just a couple scenarios from my personal experience:

1) Sometimes I tend to pay only "statement balance". This way I always carry some balance of each credit card, but pay 0 interest. And if you have a bunch of credit cards (which is pretty easy if you have high credit score) - the total balance could be higher than usual.

2) Some banks send me "promo deals" - 0 APR for next 12-18 months, with 0 transfer fee. So I put a bunch of my expenses there, and put equivalent amount in CD for a year - basically doing rate arbitrage. Not a big deal, but it is free money anyway. The downside of this - pretty huge balance on that credit card, carried for a long time. Again, 0 interest paid (+ some CD interest earned).

So, if your applicants have a history of paying on time - I, personally, would not be concerned.

As for your particular example - it sounds like they are brokerage having PM as a side business / lead generation. This might work, but their main goal is sales (if I understand correctly).