All Forum Posts by: Gerald Barron

@Linda S. Very good point. A couple months vacancy during a turnover would pretty much wipe out the extra money id get from not negotiating. Assuming, I couldn't fill the property right away.

@Paul Choi, that's kind of where I'm at. I've dealt with bad tenants and having these tenants is a breath of fresh air.

@Thomas S., Thanks for the reply. I see your point about playing hard ball. I actually agree with you in most cases. Normally, I wouldn't even consider except, like I said, it's kind of niche because its a fully furnished annual. Also, they really are great tenants. I'm curious why you think it's a bad thing to sign a two year lease? Is it not ideal to lock in great tenants as long as you can?

@Paul Choi we think we are at market rent for what we're are offering. It's difficult to gauge as most people only do seasonal rentals where it's located. Either way we are close to or above the other annual rentals in the area. @Alex Deacon, good suggestion, I'm actually thinking of counter offering that they take over lawn care which I currently pay. It's around 80/mo so I'd really only be lowering rent 120 with that deal.

As you can tell from the title I'm trying to decide whether I should lower my rent or not. Here's my situation. I have a class A property that I currently rent for 2800/mo. It is kind of niche for the area as I rent it fully furnished annually. I currently have great renters. They take good care of the property, keep it very clean, and even added 1500.00 dollars in landscaping on their own dime. Their lease is coming up in November and they want to stay but they want the rent lowered. They offered to sign a two year lease if I lowered the rent to 2600.00 a month. I think I know what I'm going to do but I thought I'd ask the community. So what would you do? Lower the rent and take the two year lease or something different?

@James Wise I’m with @Dennis M. on this one. Call me whatever you want I could care less as long as you pay the rent. Well, pay the rent and not destroy my property I will say this though. YouTube comments may be the worst place on the web for ignorant Trolls.

@Brandon Graves I’m in almost the exact same situation. My past primary residence i purchased with a VA loan. I paid 250K for it and my agent estimated I could sell for around 410K now. I pay 1400/mo mortgage and it rents for 2800/mo. We decided we are going to do a HELOC instead of sell for two reasons. One, we love the cash flow and two we love the location so much we may move back there someday. That being said, if the markets puts that house up into the 500s we will sell and 1031 into a multi family somewhere.

@Jupshy Jasmin I’m on my second year using Cozy and I’ve found it easy to use. For a couple rentals it seems to work great. I have an older couple in my one rental and they had no problems getting set up and making payments on time. I track all my expenses in Cozy and upload receipts when needed. I don’t know how well Cozy will scale but so far I enjoy its ease of use for myself and my tenants.. not to mention it’s free to use. Biggest con is it take 6-8 days on average to receive deposit. Sometimes longer if there is a holiday. This isn’t an issue for me but I can certainly see how it could be a significant drawback for some investors.

@John Thedford

Thanks John, I'll check out the area today. We just moved to Lehigh so we aren't very familiar with the good and bad areas yet. Everyone around here loves to tell us about how bad Lehigh is (especially Naples people) but they are never specific about what areas are bad. So far we've found it to be a nice quiet neighborhood where we are at. 

Also, I'm going to send you a PM with my contact information. We'd like to get some information on the house and see if the numbers work for us. 

Hi John, My wife and I might be interested. Could you PM me more details and address? (Obviously I won’t bother tenants just want to checkout neighborhood)