All Forum Posts by: Greg Scott

Probably the easiest solution would be to attach an acoustic underlayment to the ceiling and then cover that over with a second layer of drywall.

You simply take them to small claims court.

In many cases the hard part is finding them.  Most tenants that get evicted don't have USPS forward their mail.  Finding where they moved to to serve them notice can be tough.

After you serve them, you can take all your evidence to court and ask the judge for a money judgement.  There is usually only a small chance the tenant even shows up, so it is usually a one-sided argument favoring the landlord.

The next hard part is collecting.  Our properties are in Indiana where the laws are more supportive of landlords.  We only get collections from about 10-20% of the people for which we've gotten a judgement and we get a judgement against everyone we evict.  We owned a small apartment in Michigan for four years, but had exactly $0 recovered from judgements there.

@James McGovern  Many single family landlords join the apartment association. The moment you have 4 rentals you fall under all the same Fair Housing rules so are treated the same as an apartment owner.  The apartment association serves these members too.

All the collection agencies we've ever worked with are local collection agencies that understand local laws and how to get wages garnished.  I've never heard of an effective national agency.

With that in mind, I gave you the most efficient answer I could.

@James McGovern  Surely the apartment complexes in the area work with a collection agency.  Join your local apartment association and look at their vendor list.

Your customer (your renter) sets the rents.  All you can choose is what to do with your product and what price to ask, whether or not you might get it.  In some areas, no matter what you do, you could never achieve a $300-400 rent bump.

"North VA" is not enough of a location for anyone to tell you if it is remotely possible to achieve the income you desire. Seems like you need to do a market survey. Are any other nearby properties achieving that kind of rent? How? There is your answer.

@Steve Lehman  I"ll be attending the BP meetup tomorrow downtown.  Hope to see you there.

Thanks Drew!

Everyone should know, however, I'm not presenting any real estate deals I have done.  We have people that are relatively new to real estate showing their deals.  They did it right.  Their returns are fantastic.  We want to show more people how to start off doing it right too.

I have not subscribed to PassivePockets, but I didn't know it existed until earlier this year and I've been investing in syndications for more than a decade.

At the risk of stating what might be obvious, have you checked out PassivePockets?

Many syndications are RegD 506(c) which would require you to be an accredited investor.

There are fewer RegD 506(b) syndications and those allow you to be accredited or sophisiticated.  However, the SEC has no formal definition of "sophisticated". Therefore it is up to the syndicator or the group you are investing with to decide if they think you are "sophisticated".  

Frankly, if you don't understand these deals, you probably shouldn't be getting into them because there are plenty of bad ones out there that have gone to zero.  You should be able to identify the good ones and the good operators and have an understanding about how these deals are underwritten.  It is in your best interest to get some education if you don't know.

On the other hand, I have run across people who have invested in syndications and they have a hard time spelling real estate, and they clearly are not sophisticated investors.  They have gotten into deals.  I don't know if the ones they got into were any good, though.