All Forum Posts by: Grace Gudenkauf

In my area I have a huge amount of luck with Facebook Marketplace. Plus you get to see a little bit into who they appear to be on their social media, which is also great to take into account. 

That makes sense. I would caution against a luxury rental in general as an investment property. While there are certainly cases where they can make great money, in general your best recession-proof best is likely a more "average" home. There will be a much bigger tenant pool at that price point.  

Great info! As investors and landlords we often forget to work on the business, such as accounting, asset protection, hiring and delegating etc. I agree with all of these items especially #1. I tell all new investors to get a great bookkeeping system, and even consider hiring it out from the very beginning. 

Use a PM software! Totally worth the $15-$50 per month it costs. I use TenantCloud and pay for the highest plan due to having 4 users on the account. It tracks all maintenance requests well and you can make notes, add pictures, videos and communicate directly with the tenant in the maintenance request. Beyond maintenance a good PM software will auto assign late fees, e sign leases, have integrated applications and leasing and much more! This will probably be a lot more helpful than trying to use a template by hand. 

I agree, you likely need to start by firing the PM and then address the rental property specific issues. There are lots of red flags here. 

A few things:

1) I like to work directly with subs or installers for this reason. They understand bulk business and typically like to work repeatedly with the same people to keep things easy. 

2) It's easier to negotiate with subs. Let them know what you had penciled out to quote or even ask if they will do both for X. It is as simple as asking and seeing what they say. 

3) As you continue to do more jobs your confidence will grow in asking people to give you deals and this will help you negotiate. Good luck! 

Thank you for sharing these lessons learned! I agree with #1.  I always post a notice, whether or not I know rent is going to be late and have accepted the reason. This is for a few reasons, first I need to treat all of my tenants fairly. So I let them know that I am posting a notice and as long as they still pay within that timeline, it's purely policy and will not affect them. Second, it gives a specific and actionable due date. Lastly, if they indeed turn out to be giving me the run around I have already started the official notice and eviction process and do not have to start over. Of course, I have also learned this lesson the hard way. Thanks again for sharing, I think it is important that we share lessons learned to help the next investor along. 

TenantCloud is great because its user friendly and costs only $15-$50 per month. Appfolio and Buildium are much stronger but cost a pretty penny. I highly recommend trying out some of the free trials the different softwares have and seeing what works best for you. 

You need to bake the utilities into your rental amount and pay the bills on your end. 

This is a huge red flag... I would dig in further and also be curious what else they are not showing you.