All Forum Posts by: Gwen Fyfe

I am not a professional property manager. (I manage seven rentals of my own.) But I am in professional services. I do bookkeeping, accounting and tax preparation.

My first reaction is that... you sound like a nightmare client. You are the client who is going to look at what I did for you last year, and try to replicate it on your own, then present me with a mess that's going to take hours/days to untangle and tell me you should be charged less because you did some of my work for me. I don't want to work with that client. And you don't want to be that client, because I'll spend as little time talking to you as possible.

Or, if you were my boss, you'd be the micro-manager.

But, I get where it comes from. This is an area you're not that sure about yet and you're hiring a new person who you don't know to manage something that you're sinking a lot of money in to. I think most good professionals will expect to do a little hand-holding at the start. But I don't think you're going to find many who are enthusiastic about you wanting to re-check all of their work long term.

Why not treat it like hiring any other employee? Interview a few different ones, see who you trust the most, ask them to run everything by you for the first three months, and after that probationary period, decide whether you want to keep them. If you do, let them do their jobs.

Try Wells Fargo. I'll PM you my guy's name. I got a lot with one house and two small outbuildings for a total of four units, completely conventional FHA loan.

You're so nearby, have you come up and driven around it yet?

Garfield Heights is VERY street-by-street. There are some areas which are perfectly fine and where I would be happy to purchase an investment. And then there are some areas where I would be hesitant to get out of my car.

 This cracked me up, thank you! :)

I work with Chad Fields at State Farm. His office is very helpful and I get a solid deal.

 Well, it's easy to get an idea just by looking at numbers and statistics, but I'm not sure it's the most accurate idea. C/F areas? That's a pretty big difference... and I wouldn't put Euclid, Bedford or Cleveland Heights anywhere near F. You're making them sound like war zones. :)

I'm working with a few out of state investors right now and we were recently going over an MLS listing for a multifamily property right near the big Cleveland Clinic campus by University Circle. 4 units listed for under $100k, but not by much. One of the investors pointed out the "nearby sold properties" on the bottom of the page, and asked why they were so cheap - 10k, 14k, 8k. Because they're nearby, but they're in a warzone. That zip code covers the revitalizing area we were looking at, part of the East Cleveland warzone, and one of the richest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Bratenahl. If you're looking at data which is breaking things down by town or zip code, you're going to struggle to get that kind of granularity.

Also keep in mind that the last time the Google truck was through here was 2014. I use streetview all the time too, but you really want to drive those streets yourself. I recently went by one in Garfield Heights (which varies hugely from block to block) which looked great on Streetview, but I decided not to get out of the car for photos when I was actually there.

Come on out to visit, get yourself some boots on the ground, or both. :)

Having a regular job is also extremely common, but that's not a reason for your employer not to give you a W2. If your bank is giving you a cruddy interest rate and but you manage to get interest over the minimum reporting threshold, they're going to send you a 1099. How common it is or whether it's market rate doesn't make a difference. 

If you are paying them interest you should be issuing a 1099-INT.

Your tax preparer can do this for you. There shouldn't be a very large charge, it takes us about ten minutes to do.

Not all of your assumptions are correct - I am pretty much my own target renter. I make $17/hour at my day job (pretty average, even below average, for Cleveland) and live in a B-/C+ neighborhood. I'm unusual in that I'm interested in real estate, but a lot of my friends aren't, and they don't want the responsibility of owning a home. Many of them have been renting for years. This demographic, young people who don't want to purchase, is large and growing - especially in Cleveland where the growth is coming from young hipsters like me moving out here. :)

Of course you're right that many other renters are families who can't (or think they can't) purchase their own homes.

Have you visited Cleveland? Most of the city is very low density by American city standards.

@Helen Zhang My perspective is - if you're providing appliances, you're getting tenants who are willing and able to pay for the convenience. For me when I was a renter, I would show up in a new city for work and not have a lot of time for anything but work. I am happy to throw money at convenience. I don't want to spend some of my precious free time (or have to take time off work!) dealing with the hassle of shopping for appliances, getting them installed, etc., and I definitely don't want to lug them around the next time I have to move. I would happily pay $100 a month to not have to think about that.

Same thing for my renters. People who want to pick out their appliances, build homes, spend time and responsibility on it, I think they tend to go buy a house. Renters want convenience.

Hi Helen, I think you're going to have a lot of variation in answers here. A lot of this stuff depends on the type of neighborhood you're in, and Cleveland has huge variety. I invest in Bedford, which is a little working class town on the East side. A lot of people like Lakewood, which is a hipper town on the West side. Those are going to be pretty different. In fact, it's even going to be different between Bedford and Garfield Heights, which is right next door.

But, my answers... (from perspective of a past renter and current landlord, although I only started this year!)

1. Out of five units, I provide the appliances in four of them. When the current tenant moves out of the one where they have their own appliances, I'll put appliances in that unit. I think this is much more convenient for the tenants and I can charge better rents. Washer and dryer depend on the size of the place (I don't provide them in my efficiency apartments, just because they wouldn't fit, and there's a laundromat around the corner) but I always want to provide fridge and stove. I don't have dishwashers in any of my rentals.

2. I've only been doing this a year, but I haven't had an eviction yet. I did give an inherited tenant a pay or quit and she let me know she would move out this weekend. We'll see if she sticks to it!

3. Not too often. With five units I've had two late payments this year, not counting the lady I was going to evict. It's not a big deal. My tenants are very good about letting me know ahead of time and checking about what I need them to do.

4. In one year I've had a tenant lock himself out twice, and one asked me to fix his stove - which turned out to just be an extinguished pilot light. That's it. I do try to ask about any issues when I'm picking up rent so that I'm on top of stuff, and I have made a couple repairs before tenants asked me to. (Installing new railing on exterior stairs, re-caulking around a leaky window.)

5. I'm about to deal with my very first move-out so we'll see!