All Forum Posts by: Ian S.

Hi Chad,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, PMs are providing monthly and year end reporting of expenses/income tracking. 

We want to track expenses on a per property basis as well as overall. (how much did we spent on maintenance this year, how much on cap ex, etc - to help us identify strong performing and weak properties)

Any advice appreciated.

Hi. We own 11 SFH rentals, spread among 3 property managers (different states). All 3 PMs use Appfolio and pay us monthly. Any expenses go against reserves of $500 per property and if any expenses are higher than that, we make an owner payment through the portal. While most of our expenses for each property go through the various Appfolios, some are done directly from our credit card.

All this has become a bit of an accounting nightmare. Until now we've been using a pretty unwieldy home-baked Google Sheet to track our expenses, but are looking for a more elegant solution.

Our wish list:

1. Must be cloud based - we don't always have the same laptop with us so we need a 100% web based solution.
2. Must be mobile friendly - We want to be able to upload receipts on-the-go and categorize them. We want to be able to pull out our phone and see how a particular property is doing.
3. Must be affordable. We’re really struggling with sticker shock at QB Online $35 a month, Xero $30 a month and Rentec Direct $45 a month (!)
4. Must be easy-to-use. QB Online doesn't seem to support rentals "out of the box". Some people set up buildings as Customers, and units as Jobs (or maybe Tenants?), while some set it up with buildings being Categories - (!) and if we choose the wrong model, we’re stuck forever? We can’t even change the term “Customers” to “Buildings” so we’re concerned about how any produced reports would look.
5. We don't need it to be able to send out and pay bills, or track rents (apart from rental income) - we have PMs/Appfolios for that.
6. We don’t want to rely on downloading transactions from an online bank - since most of our online activity is tracked through the 3 appfolio's we’ll have to manually enter it all. (That's ok!)

Any suggestions?

By the way, are there are BP Webinars on Accounting? We couldn't see any, but that’d be helpful :)  

Thanks!

Thanks for the comment! As soon as we form an LLC (whether it be in state or out of state) it triggers the California LLC Franchise tax of $800 a year. There are many threads on biggerpockets about it. The state has beautiful weather but it's not the most friendly climate for real estate investment!! From another thread:

Any comments? Thanks!

Hi, since I live in California, an LLC is not a viable option for me for my out of state rentals (9 of them, mostly B/C). They are all managed by a property manager. It bothers me however that for my tenants it is so easy to find out who I am and where I live with one simple click on a real estate listing to get the property tax records. I was considering setting up a virtual mailbox (travelingmailbox.com maybe) to at least hide where I live, even though my name would be there. I realize that it would be far from bulletproof, but is it worth $15 a month just to make it a little more difficult to find out who I am (how much my own home is worth, etc.) and dissuade frivolous lawsuits (or creepy tenants).

Thanks!

We're considering buying SFH rentals in Atlanta. We're out of state, so we'll need property management. We own several buy and hold SFHs in Charlotte and work with someone who's both a realtor and a PM. That's worked really well for us and we'd ideally like to find someone like that in Atlanta. Does anyone have any suggestions? Or suggestions for fabulous PM plus a great investor-friendly realtor? Thanks!

Maybe you could start by house hacking to both get your feet wet and cut down on housing costs?  It sounds like your major could be both lucrative and exciting.  I'm sure there's opportunities outside of lab work and you're already 2 years and $40K invested.  Why not see it through while you explore real estate?  W-2 income is seriously helpful when applying for loans.

Thanks for the opinions all.  You've given my wife and I much to think about,  The tenant in question was inherited with the property, and did not go through any of the vetting our PM would normally do.   We're not sure of their ability to ever pay back.

I'm surprised about the strong reactions here against cash for keys - I'd heard so many positive things (including on blog posts here).   In our case, we were thinking of using it as a "proactive" means of replacing a potentially problematic tenant (in a newly acquired property) that we hadn't vetted with one we had.

Hi!

First time post. Looking for some advice from the community. One of the properties we recently purchased in Charlotte, NC had a problematic tenant. We knew he was problematic going into the deal, and it only took 2 months before he stopped paying and we had grounds to have our PM evict him. On the way out, he took the range, did some damage (about $1000 worth) and also owes us about $1000 in back rent. Of course he didn’t leave a forwarding address. Our PM says to have any chance of getting any of this money back (probably total $2-3k) we could hire a private investigator to track him down (about $150) and sue him (lawyer fees about $200). But, he didn’t hold out much hope that we’d ever see a penny - all that it would do is guarantee this guy would always have a hard time renting any property ever again.

Should we do this? Or we are throwing good money after bad?

(And yes, we should have done cash-for-keys.. next time!)

Thanks!

Ian