All Forum Posts by: Douglas Krofcheck

Many people use Google Voice for their phones service as it allows landlords to screen, record, and preview calls. You can have it ring multiple phones so you don't need to give tenants your primary number nor do you need to carry around an extra phone only for tenants. Building your business around your phone number and then having access cut off would be bad for some people.

Has anyone used Properly Rent for online rent payments?  Their features appear to be a subset of Cozy but they allow tenants to reuse their credit report for multiple landlords instead of having to pay for it again and again (does Cozy do that too?  I couldn't tell).   Their free ACH transfers are also faster.

The company got started in 2016 and there isn't much about them online nor could I find any BP posts about them.  I did find two property listings using them, so they at least have a couple customers...

What makes Europe different enough that the primary services don't fit well?

Well if your lease says it...  Personally I would feel better moving it to a storage unit for a month or two to see how the tenants react before doing something I couldn't undo.

Please keep us updated on how things go.  I have a similar situation on my hands.  Between when I inspected a property and bought it, a new tenant filled up half the basement with stuff.  Sadly their lease has nothing about storage or common areas.   I'll need to do foundation repairs so at least I have that angle to get the basement partially cleaned up.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.  I closed on my first property this past week! (house hacking a dual building 3-unit).

I'm going ahead with 1 email per unit and another 1 per building.  The point being any bills, service accounts, repairs, etc... can be performed from the related accounts which could make it easier manage everything.  Or it might make everything harder.  I'm not certain so I'll try it out while I'm small.  In theory I'm going to DIY my own property management software.  I know that has a poor time-cost analysis compared to learning an existing product, but I'm a software engineer by trade and enjoy building that sort of thing.  Eventually I want to do everything through a web portal but I'm not there yet.  @Timothy Church, is a 3rd party providing your portal access or is it all custom made?

I got my domain and email accounts through 1and1.  They have an excellent intro offer of around $1 a month for the first year.  For anyone reading this in a year or two, feel free to tag me and ask if the multiple accounts worked out or not.

@Steve Babiak, I've used that + email feature in the past and had to blow up on me.  A lot of mailing lists will accept those email address, but their unsubscribe input box say the address is invalid so you can never unsubscribe.  Granted it's easy to create an email rule to delete all those emails, but it's still annoying.

I think people are overlooking one small benefit of the HELOC plan. Using a HELOC, you make the initial 15K payment first while the savings account user would be making smaller payments over a longer period of time to hit that 15K. If the interest rates are different enough and it takes you awhile to save 15K, then that could make the hassle of dealing with a HELOC worth it. But I expect you'd do better re-signing up for internet to get a cheaper rate or something else to reduce your real costs instead of playing with payment timing.

As far as automating as much as possible and treating the properties as a professional business, is using custom email address for each unit (like: 123StreetA at company dot com*) taking it too far?

Some benefits are you don't have to worry about the tenants not including their location if they email you from a different address and changing PMs won't require changing your contact info.  Some drawbacks are being impersonal and not having a generic business card for everything.  

I've moved around a lot and have never come across a management company doing this. I'm going to close on my first property on Monday and am trying to setup everything so it can easily scale as I gain more units. I'm also setting up a virtual address and phone number. I probably should have done everything in a LLC, but figuring all that out on my own was a bit too much for my first property. I know better for next time.

Any other advice is welcome too. Thanks.

*BP post filtering won't let me format that example as a real address

I'm not suggesting you give up, just don't underestimate your potential future costs.  That's the biggest risk for us newbies.

I don't know anything about construction loans, but I assumed the bank assumed you were flipping the property and not trying to live in it.  You wouldn't need another loan so why limit construction?

Did they tell you they wanted to buy it or did you already know that? If not, sounds like a scam.

Who applied first? If you're concerned about dogs hurting your kids, why did you not limit your ad to small animals or no pets? If you don't leave your kids outside unsupervised, why does it matter if someone else has dogs? Is the lawn shared? Whatever you do, you are not accepting someone because someone else was accepted first and you are sorry you made them pay for a background check before the other application was finished being processed. Do not mention pets or occupation when not accepting someone at this time. You are not rejecting anyone.