All Forum Posts by: Francis Rusnak

This advice is given 1000 times over again and I personally found it impossible to listen to and still had to learn the hard way, but don't take the lowest bid. 

Seeing the same on our end. We are about to close on one without zoning and just get an affidavit from the seller. But this is a single-family and it's probably not recommended to do that with a multi since that's where most of the issues come up and I think it's required by title for multi buildings. 

A lot of great tips in this thread. I want to highlight some of the gems:

-Paul/Mark Ainley's tip of rent too high equals only bad applicants.
-Brie Schmidt's tip of how if you aren't getting it rented by the 20th it's leftovers.
-John Warren's tip from experience. Sometimes these need to be pounded in our head because many people will still try to make a square peg fit in a round hole even if they know better. And ask me how I know. 
-Matthew Olszak's math of the situation how even if you lower the rent you'll still make up for it so long as you don't have a month's vacancy. Plus, you'll likely have a better level of tenant which usually equals longer stay. 
-Matthew's suggestion to reach out to 'good-on-paper' applicants as to why they didn't go through with the apartment. Usually you can elicit the truest feedback from this. 

Matthew's tip of requiring the tenant to email/text is good as well. I have been responding to all the auto responders with an auto response of my own and the good ones will usually come out of that. 

I don't know about Fundrise, but Realty Mogul is solid and gets my recommendation. 

4.5 years ago I did a handful in each Realty Mogul and Realty Shares. Mogul has exited all my spots, gave me good returns, no complaints. Things were filed on time for the most part, although they both gave you the K1s late for taxes, but that's not their fault it falls on the sponsor. 

Realty Shares has been very disappointing. They had a buyout in the middle of my term with them so I'm guessing the old staff didn't vet out the sponsors well. I still have 5 active investments with them - four of which were supposed to have been exited 1-3 years ago. 

I'm actively investing in my own deals now, but would consider using Mogul again down the road. I wanted to post this since it was hard to find honest feedback when I first invested with them. 

Has anyone had luck getting it rented using archived photos and starting the leasing process prior to the old tenant moving out? With the new tenant not having personally stepped foot in the place.

I've started to stock 3D walkthrough videos to help with potentially doing this in the future. But no sample size to speak of yet. 

On your Owner Portal -- Finance > Request Rent Increase

You have to submit comps off their gosection8 page and I've heard they are very slow now at getting back about this -- if anyone tried this recently I'd love to know a relevant timeline. 

We've been at 2-4 weeks; we haven't had one in city limits since Dec. Put another in contract today so we'll see how that goes ...

Really is different for every area specifically because of the taxes. But rule of thumbs are always great to whittle deals through the funnel; so I'd say 1% is a minimum on Chicago area deals with the high taxes. If you want more cash flow go to South Side of the city; more appreciation on the North Side as general rule. 

We used Will County Well in New Lenox on a property in Homer Glen and were happy w them. 

If you turn off the main water line in the house you can see if the meter is still running so you know if it's within the house or out to street.