All Forum Posts by: Jamie Brayton

This is helpful. I have a home daycare, which has really unique rules and makes personal/business deductions a little trickier, but thank you so much for clarifying how this impacts rental properties.

Can anyone shed light on how/if taking the standard deduction impacts rental property deductions? 

I run an unrelated business from home as a sole proprietor that will be impacted by the change, but my understanding is that we can still take all appropriate deductions on rental properties. We have self-manged properties in LLCs and in our own name. 

I was wondering if any of you send out a spring/summer checklist as the warmer weather approaches? If so, I’d love to know what is on it for single and multi-family homes. We have one for ourselves, but I’m looking for things we might want to share with our tenants. I’m thinking along the lines of removing personal items for mowing services, a reminder about trash/debris/lawn item pick up. What am I forgetting?

@Samuel Pawlitzki  @Dennis Wasilewski  @Cara Lonsdale @Andrew Johnson

This is all really helpful. The reality is I can get most of the basic information myself. I felt that the stream of information I was receiving was A. awful and B. inaccurate. The rent roll, in particular, seemed off.  I'd love to have more experiences like Dennis. We generally know what we can spend and what we are looking for, so when we find a potential property it feels so much easier to have a detailed list of expenses so we can make a preliminary decision before we even see the building. It just seems to save so much time. We're finding realtors just want to get us in to view places as soon as possible.

Another way we are attacking this problem is pre-qualifying with other banks. We've had great luck with a local bank, but they aren't really interested in pre-qualifying buyers. Instead, they want to run numbers for each house individually. It isn't clear to me which practice is standard, but running numbers for each house individually is slowing us down. For example, we lost this particular house because someone grabbed it over the weekend and we couldn't run numbers with our guy until Monday. 

What information do you ask for from a seller's realtor and when? 

In an ideal world I would ask for and get basic numbers upfront (utilities, maintenance expenses, accurate rent rolls, etc), as it would allow us to go into a showing ready to act quickly. 

Backstory: So far, we've purchased our properties as foreclosures or before they were listed (no realtors involved). We're looking for our next property and this process feels kind of sloppy. I'm not getting great or fast info from the seller's realtor, yet they are sort of pushing us along.  We obviously won't be making a move until we have a complete picture, and we need to loop our bank in before we get an unofficial pre-pre-approval of sorts to even have a more serious conversation. 

It is completely possible I have the steps of this process wrong or that I'm just impatient. If this question made any sense, I'd love tips on how to make this part of the process run smoother. Our market is pretty hot, so if we are going to get a great property we need to make educated decisions quickly.

Bettina F. Have you found that the underpayment wears out over time?

You are all SO helpful. These replies helped us pick flooring for this unit and others!

Matthew Olszak This is definitely a lower end unit. We’ve been learning how to DIY a ton of projects, and learning to install something like this is next on my list.

@nicole w Great advice!!

Jd Martin We did use a nice commercial glue and commercial grade plank leftover from a job (my husband’s family has a general contracting company). With our first property we were able to use up really high quality odds and ends we had, but that isn’t realistic for future priorities. With this next property, I’m looking to find materials that are easier on our time and budget. I’m also in charge of these residential properties, and it is probably clear I have much less technical knowledge than they do!