All Forum Posts by: James Call

My sister-in-law was a competitive body builder, professional mountain bike racer, and a personal trainer in a corporate gym.  She was always in great shape. 

I was stunned one day when she told me: "NO amount of excercise can compensate for a bad diet."  

WHAT!??!?!?!!? 

This was coming from a woman who was the model of physical fitness.  

It is true.  I am going to be 50 in a few days and a lot of people think I must run a bunch.  I am not a great musclular speciman, but I am in better shape than a lot of my friends and family who are 20 years younger than I am. 

I have 4 rules for a great diet.  

1. NO SODA.  If you are drinking carbonated beverages you can't even think about good health in my opinion.  The carbonation keeps your body from being able to access nutrients in your other food.  Sodas also are just full of chemicals and sugar. Which takes me to the next point.

2. No sugar.  This doesn't mean you can't have a piece of pumpkin pie at Grandma's house for Thanksgiving or eat one of the amazing cinnamon rolls that your tenants bring you on your birthday.  It means you don't buy sugar or sugary treats for your home.  No candy, no cookies, no ice cream, etc. 

The first 2 will take care of about 90% of your fitness and diet issues. If you are hard-core of just have digestive, skin, or allergy issues go for the second 2 and see if you find a difference:

3. No Milk.    If you still have trouble with your digestion, then move away from dairy.  That doesn't mean you can't have a cheese burger once a month, but it means that you don't drink four glasses of milk a day.  In the USA most of the milk is related to dietary issues.

4. No Wheat.  WHAT??!?!  Yep.  There are a lot of gut issues related to  gluten and wheat.  AGAIN, this doesn't mean that if you occassionally have whole wheat pasta that you are going to explode.  It just means don't base your diet on bread and milk.

I know people who live off of sugar, wheat, and dairy.  Donuts, Frosted Flakes, etc.. Guess how healthy they are?

If you remove these foods you will have a diet of mostly vegetables, fruit, and meat.   

If you do this religiously for the next 60 days, please paypal me $10 for each pound you lose and I will use that to pay for my son's college tuition! :)

Then just walk.  Walk to the store, or anywhere you can.  I think it is funny that I and other people will drive to the fitness center, but we can't walk to the school, church, office, bank, store, etc. that is just 2-3 blocks from our home.  Walking gives you about 90% of the benefits of jogging with about 10% of the wear and tear on your body.

@Katie Stewart, @Nathan Gesner, @Leo Poon, @William Hochstedler, @Thomas S.,

Thanks for all of the advice. 

We spoke to a real estate attorney who is a friend of ours.  We ended up sending them a notice that they were breaking the conditions of their contract and could be evicted for it.  We told them that the person causing problems was no longer allowed on the property. 

Then we gave the 2 tenants who were getting the letters a phone call.  I told them they would get a letter, that we wanted things to be nice for them, and that if it didn't get taken care of, we would be forced to evict.   The phone call was the good cop, the letter is the bad cop.  

One of the tenants was very apologetic and nice on the phone call, the other one, not so much.  

We don't want to babysit, but we also don't want to lose our good tenants.  Our attorney suggested that this would be very effective and if it didn't work out, we just evict the tenants.  

Thanks again to everyone.  We hope that this chapter is closed. :)

@Todd Powell  I did let the tenant know we are working on it as quickly as we can.  The smokers are not our tenants, but the neighbors.  

It looks like we will need to send that disturbance warning.  

Thanks for the advice. 

@Shannon M.

Thanks for that advice.  I think we are going to send that 3 day notice to cure.  We also want to stay out of the counseling business.  

The neighbors are not our tenants. I will reach out to the owner and let them know and let the HOA know. That is good advice.

Thanks,
James

My wife and I own a condo in a college town in Utah.  

We have 4 women renting the condo.  Two are students and two are non-students who work in the area. 

One of the non-students and one of the students are roommates and share a room. The other student and non-student have their own private rooms. The non-students are close friends and the students are both close friends.

One of the "non-students" just called to ask how to get out of her contract.  She told us that the students are bringing over guests starting at 10pm and staying until the wee hours of the morning.  They are making a lot of noise and don't allow her to sleep. 

She also told us that one of the student's male friends makes her feel very uncomfortable with vulgar language. 

To add a monkey wrench in the works, the men who live in the next door condo are smoking pot.  She has called the cops on them and it hasn't accomplished much.  We had a previous tenant who also called the police on the next door neighbors for smoking pot. 

We DO NOT want to lose the non-student as a tenant.  Our contract says something boilerplate about tenants can't disrupt the peace of other tenants. 

What should we do about the noise and the annoying visitor?

Do we have a meeting with just the students and give them the "first warning"? Just verbally and tell them that we have mailed something to them?

Should we hire an attorney?

What about the pot-smoking neighbors?  It is still against the law in Utah to smoke pot, by the way. :)

Thanks,
James

@Cheri Jordan, 

Welcome to BP.  

What do you feel are the best options for out of state investors in your market?

Can you share a little about what kinds of things you saw working with your investor clients?

Good luck in your journey!

@Cody Malone,

I really like @Joan Brown's comment. 

You can find properties like this with a 2% but you have to be willing to work hard to get it. 

My theory on this is that you either typically get cash flow or appreciation from a property. 

A & B properties provide appreciation and low or no cashflow.  
C & D properties provide good cash flow and low or no appreciation.  

You will have to spend a lot of time screening tenants, and work with folks who can't rent other properties to get those 2% deals.  Sometimes getting a little lower percentage up front can work out later.

We bought a property about a year ago that was a little over 1% but now that rents have gone up and the property has appreciated as much as our down payment, we can get about 1.5% for rent and we hope to see that go up over the next few years.  

Who knows? maybe in 5 years it will be 2% on that original purchase price.  Meanwhile it is a quiet and nice rental that pays the bills and has a decent cash flow.

Good luck!

@Beau Fannon,

I agree with what you heard from @Danny Webber and @Aaron Gordy.   I really liked Danny's #2.  Honest communication about their ability and understanding of a market.  Not everyone really understands the duplex market in Dallas or the condo market in Houston, but all agents would love to have the commission check on either of those. :)

@Shital Thakkar also mentioned that they should have active listings.  I work with some agents who claim to be experts in a market (see above) and yet have no listings.  That is a red flag for me.

@Nina Hayden's comment about staying a few steps ahead is something you won't see until you do the first transaction with the agent. 

We bought a property earlier this year with an agent who didn't really understand the market and needed me to guide them the whole way.  That worked out OK since I knew the area really well and own other properties there, but I would have been really concerned to use that agent in a situation where I didn't know what was going on.
 
There are two things to look for:
1. What they look like before the deal
2. What they look like after the deal

You want to look for as many of these things that folks have listed as you can BEFORE you sign something with them.  Once you do the deal with them, take notes about what the agent did well for you and what you didn't like.  Then when you are ready for your next deal review those notes and see if this is someone you want to work with again.

We are working with a new agent on a deal.  The deal didn't go through, but we like working with this agent so much, we will keep working with them as we try to close the next deal.

Good luck!

@Louis Collins

Those numbers look good to me.  If you can put $9000 down and make 135 a month, that is 1620 per year.  That is 18% cash on cash.  Plus all of the paydown of the loan, and tax benefits.  That looks like a deal to me.

Let me know if I can help out with anything. 

Thanks,

@Scott Kelly

We have had this same issue with some of our investments. 

I think there are a lot of "hidden" costs in selling a property.  Realtor fees, closing costs (if it is customary in your area for sellers to help out with that), etc... I tell most landlords we work with to figure about 10% off the top of the sale price to go to those expenses. 

If you are just starting as a landlord, that might be a good property to keep for a few years and learn the ropes of landlording on.  You have some equity there and you would have a nice cashflow like @Michael Pearse mentioned.  

18% on a property like that sounds pretty good in my experience.  You can always get more doing other things, but sometimes getting the experience in a fairly simple situation is priceless.

Let us know what you decide to do.  If I can help out with anything let me know!