All Forum Posts by: JD Martin

Only if I could accept that I may be providing charity and repairing the house later. Otherwise, no. Mixing business with friendship, and (often) family, can turn out to be a very bad idea. I will say that I have rented to friends (mine or my wife's) three times, and all three times ended very poorly. In the case of my wife's friends, the rental precipitated the end of the friendship. In the case of my friends, we still remained friends but I never forgot the damages I absorbed nor the fact that I nearly had to evict his squatter children after he moved out. 

Quote from @Patricia Andriolo-Bull:

Combining several prior threads, not necessarily saying that they are related but...

Thermostats-recently someone asked if we lock thermostats.  I hadn't but do include a minimum of 69 in my Welcome Guide.  Reason being - I'm in SWFL and replaced one of my AC units last summer because it froze from a contractor running it with all the windows open in the summer.  My HVAC company recommendation was above 70.  Today, I checked my thermostat in all 3 units.  I normally don't do this but 2 are vacant and was making sure the AC was set at my standard 76.  The guest in the occupied unit had the AC set to 50 DEGREES!  The only reason it reset to 74 is because a guest must have put that on a schedule for Sunday otherwise it would have been a solid 50 the entire time.  Basically, from the moment they got there, almost 4 days ago!  It shows the AC running 24 hours every day!  Photo for a visual...

-This is my first Booking.Com guest in some time.  I generally have great guests as I have said on here before.  Maybe 2 or 3 in the 9 years I've had vacation rentals guests I would want to rent to again.  I have found BDC guests a bit needy and they don't communicate but nothing like this.  

I am not looking forward to getting my electric bill this month.  What is wrong with people?  Does anyone actually set an AC to 50 in their own home?  And yes, I see that people have been setting it below my recommended 69 previously, well, now I am locking it.  I hate to be one of those hosts...

 And that's just a perfect illustration of why we have remote, lockable thermostats in our Florida property. Stupidity. Yes, your electric bill is going to suck but what sucks even more than high electric bills is HVAC repairs. 

I have the Google Nest learning thermostats. They're excellent. Even if I forget to turn it up during vacancies, it does it for me when it senses there's no one around. I can see the same kind of report as what you have there. The only downside to it is having to change from summer to winter as far as the ranges. It does have a "heat+cool" option that should prevent me from having to mess with it, but you can't set separate ranges so whatever your range is for cooling is going to be locked for heat as well. 

As far as people: I was meeting our window contractor at one of our units today to go over some windows they are going to be replacing between tenants. The tenant had almost every window open with the screens, and the AC unit going as well. 

We started out using mostly white cabinets, the laminated kind. Eventually switched to unfinished oak. The oak have held up better over time. We don't have any issues cleaning the white cabinets but they are laminate over MDF and in some of the properties they've started to delaminate. The oak can be touched up with poly pretty easy and if anything gets damaged are also easy to match up for replacement. 

I've never had a single bit of feedback from tenants either way. Most tenants just don't care about those things. 

 We install basic Frigidaire models. People don't understand that higher priced models generally just means more doodads, not better build quality. You look at the guts of anything off the shelf that you're buying on dishwashers, washing machines, dryers etc and they're all the same pumps, belts, drums, valves, etc. Doodads cost money and break more often. 

 Not sure why you tagged me, but that's not the question that was asked. He wanted to know if it is worth it to have a dishwasher, not whether he is legally required to provide one in an already occupied unit. 

 The risk you run is in some instance of significant appreciation, not being able to close on it anyway especially if the seller goes to court and raises some issue that allows the court to set aside the agreement - signing under some claimed duress, for example, or unfair loss of value. Courts can and do refuse to enforce contracts they view as unfair or one sided. So you might end up being able to buy but at some higher price. That's why you're really in a spo where a bird in hand is worth potentially well more than two in the bush.

No one can tell you what you should do. From your post I agree with your parents because your "strategy" sounds like scattershot to me. But you have to wake up every day and live in your skin, so you'll have to figure that out. 

What I will tell you is this: I came from a total blue-collar existence. No one went to college - hell, no one even finished high school. I was never going to college. I went to the Navy instead. But eventually, I found myself in college, it was a great experience, and I ended up with a PhD after many years. Not once have I ever regretted investing education into myself. The RE "empire", such that it is, that I bought was bought with money I made from having a good career thanks to my education. 

I think you should just hold them to the current contract or let them buy you out of the contract. "I changed my mind" isn't a valid legal reason to negate a contract, especially if you're willing and able to complete the deal. Let them buy your signature on a cancellation for some reasonable amount of money for your time & effort, or let them know that you're prepared to have an attorney proceed to force consummation of the contract that they freely signed.

Why would you want to go through the time, cost and effort of putting a new wrinkle on a property you already have under contract? 

 I started off all-cash because I had taken a big loss before, so when I got back in I was gunshy about using any kind of credit. Eventually I hit a wall on being able to invest and came around to the idea of leverage. Looking back I missed a lot of opportunities at a golden time of buying (2010 onward) because of my insistence on all cash, including the rehabs. I would have probably had double the portfolio I have now, if I had used leverage from the beginning.

There's also another benefit of leverage - the bank becomes your partner, and puts another set of eyes on the project. Because they don't want to lose money, they're going to scrutinize the project for you almost for free, and are going to (probably) refuse to lend you money on poor projects. That right there limits your risk of going it alone and buying something that just ends up being a money pit. 

I get the attraction of all cash, and I still have houses that I own outright, but if you are trying to grow you will be light years ahead with smart leverage. The acceleration of cash slows down considerably when it's trapped in a house. 

Before anything, you should have a screening process and then stick to it. Otherwise you're just making it up on the fly. If you don't care about credit scores - and they're only one piece of the puzzle - then that part is not necessarily a disqualifier, but if you do care about seeing their credit in the first place - since past performance here is going to give you a good idea of future performance - then they should be completing your credit (and background) check anyway regardless of how they want to pay. 

Credit isn't just about paying a bill on time. It says a lot about your personal values. If you have a loan for everything under the sun, and all of it is 30/60/90 past due or in collections, it says that you are a person who doesn't care about agreements, rules, or the consequences of non-payment. That would bother me more than a person with a 500 credit score with just a handful of creditors paid on time and half a dozen huge medical bills in collections. 

Also: never ignore red flags. I don't know how many tenants we've had by now, but the only "bad" ones were ones that had red flags right from the get-go that we ignored.