All Forum Posts by: Jim Workman

@Tim Carter  Maybe just cleaner women in the second building.

I offered to make a short-term loan from my SDIRA to a friend who is buying a property in St Louis.  Neither of us has ever done this before so we would like to know the correct way to set up the contract.  Should we go through a loan broker / attorney?  Does someone have a sample loan template?

Any other advise?

I have two identical 6-unit buildings on the same lot, but they get separate utility bills. One of the units consistantly gets water bills more than double the other building.  I found that the Kansas City Water Dept has a graph of the last 90 days' usage. 

If the links below work, you will need to click on 90 days and click on gallons:

Building 1
Building 2

My first surprise came when I looked at the lower-usage building.  The minimum usage is about 75 gal/day. However, about once a month, the usage shoots over 1000 gals. The average there is about 200 g/day, but since the end of November, usage has increased significantly.

The high-usage unit has a minimum of 75 gal/day with an average of about 400 g/day and more spikes over 1000 gals. However, since the end of November, its usage seems to have gone down.

The gas bill has been similarly higher in this building. I believe the gas only covers the hot water and heating the common areas. Last March, this building's gas bill was $725 vs $250 for the other building.

My property manager has checked for leaks, but the daily swings make leaks unlikely.

The 3rd party coin-op laundry in the basement is usually broken so I'm thinking some the spikes could be due to washing in the sink or bathtub.  I'm also wondering if someone is running hot water to heat his apartment.

Has anyone had experiences with tenants wasting water to this degree? Do you have other ideas as to what is going on?  Money laundering:)

I'm also open to suggestions as to corrections.

I just stumbled upon John T Reed's ratings of various Gurus.

I don't know anything about Mr Reed, but I think it would be worth checking his blog before plunking down your hard-earned cash for a course or boot camp.

Others may want to critique Reed.

A recent rainstorm flooded one of my apartments.  We found that water came down the street and, instead of making the right turn, came directly across my parking pad and into a ground-level window.

I just got a letter from another owner saying that the first four properties along the street were having similar issues.  

We are now looking for an engineer to help us control the flow.

Anyone have any recommendations?

@David Hodge I got letters from Birmingham about assessments.  ($90k for $65k purchase.)  I sent HUDs.  They scheduled a hearing which I could not attend.

They went with their original assessments.

I'm afraid that my title made people think that this was a thread about QuickBooks.  It was meant to be a call-to-arms to demand better export options from property management software packages.

I have reposted as:

"Property Management Software Can't Export Transactions"

Sorry for double posting, but most did not understand the point.  This is not about QuickBooks so much as about exporting detailed info from property management packages.

Am I the only investor who wants to track my properties' income vs expenses in QuickBooks? My property managers act like they have never had anyone ask them for a spreadsheet of monthly activities. I would think that a detailed CSV export would be a standard part of any property management software package. It looks like Buildium may have some export options, but PropertyWare and AppFolio don't make it easy. My newest PM uses AppFolio, but doesn’t even bother to put the expenses into it.

It’s not that I am a great fan of QuickBooks. For a program that has been around for many years, it is amazingly limited in what it can import from a spreadsheet. But at least it deigns to accept simple journal entries from a CSV file.

I have 22 doors with my Kansas City PM so I spend a lot of time converting a PropertyWare report printed to Excel into an IIF file to import into QuickBooks as a journal entry. Last month I wrote a tutorial of all the steps for my wife. I go through over 30 steps to convert the data, make sure that it matches my Owner's Statement, and is in balance. That sounds like more trouble than it is worth, but I would rather do that than typing each transaction into QB.

One perk is that I am forced to understand each transaction so that I can classify it properly. A $20 income for ‘Other Interest’ turned out to be a parking fee. (PropertyWare doesn’t have parking fee income.) Sometimes the PM doesn’t classify expenses the way that my CPA would so I have to be responsible for recognizing capital expenditures, etc.

I post monthly mortgage, insurance, and property tax amounts to get a good feel for how each property is performing. (I keep the mortgage separate because not all properties have the same percentages.) I was surprised to find that my single-family houses in Birmingham were performing better than my multifamilies in KC. The utilities for one building were astronomical last winter, and will be watched closely this year.

After a year of out-of-state investing, I am finally getting a picture of how my properties are performing. I would think that other investors would want to have a clear financial view of their properties each month.  Does anyone else try to track their rental activities?

If so, please demand that your PMs give you simple detailed spreadsheets including all transactions. Then maybe they will complain to the property management software companies to include those export features in their packages.

Am I the only investor who wants to track my properties' income vs expenses in QuickBooks?  My property managers act like they have never had anyone ask them for a spreadsheet of monthly activities.  I would think that a detailed CSV export would be a standard part of any property management software package.  It looks like Buildium may have some export options, but PropertyWare and AppFolio don't make it easy.  My newest PM uses AppFolio, but doesn’t even bother to put the expenses into it.

It’s not that I am a great fan of QuickBooks.  For a program that has been around for many years, it is amazingly limited in what it can import from a spreadsheet.  But at least it deigns to accept simple journal entries from a CSV file.

I have 22 doors with my Kansas City PM so I spend a lot of time converting a PropertyWare report printed to Excel into an IIF file to import into QuickBooks as a journal entry.  Last month I wrote a tutorial of all the steps for my wife.   I go through over 30 steps to convert the data, make sure that it matches my Owner's Statement, and is in balance.  That sounds like more trouble than it is worth, but I would rather do that than typing each transaction into QB.

One perk is that I am forced to understand each transaction so that I can classify it properly.   A $20 income for ‘Other Interest’ turned out to be a parking fee.  (PropertyWare doesn’t have parking fee income.)  Sometimes the PM doesn’t classify expenses the way that my CPA would so I have to be responsible for recognizing capital expenditures, etc.

I post monthly mortgage, insurance, and property tax amounts to get a good feel for how each property is performing.   (I keep the mortgage separate because not all properties have the same percentages.)   I was surprised to find that my single-family houses in Birmingham were performing better than my multifamilies in KC.  The utilities for one building were astronomical last winter, and will be watched closely this year.

After a year of out-of-state investing, I am finally getting a picture of how my properties are performing.   I would think that other investors would want to have a clear financial view of their properties each month.

If so, please demand that your PMs give you simple detailed spreadsheets including all transactions.  Then maybe they will complain to the property management software companies to include those export features in their packages.

@Dave Hemrick  It looks like you have gotten some really great feedback.  I can only add that you might get a good third-party appraisal so you know how much equity you will have.