All Forum Posts by: John Barcellona

In general we're always told to increase rent slightly every year with the lease renewal. As mentioned this could especially be important if approaching a portfolio type loan. But I see both sides. If you are a smaller invester and in full growth mode, trying to acquire as much as you can while still working your W-2 job, with family responsibilities, etc then you may want to minimize turnover for a time as this could consume a decent amount of time (and might make you miss a deal perhaps) . However, if you own 30 doors, with well established systems in place, then I think most would say go up on the rent as much as you reasonably can every year. If you only increase your rents buy the exact amount of the cost of living index every year, few tenants will have an issue with this. Also, if the tenant is a great tenant and takes care of your house a makes small repairs and stuff, very different from a below average tenant who's bugging you all the time for little repairs (or who's often late on their rent payments).

I'm in the energy corridor area and have 5 rentals out of state but want to start investing in Katy as that's where I plan to move next year. If there's a Zoom meet up, I'm definitely game. Thanks.

@Tushar Prasad by slab elevation, I mean the elevation of the concrete slab of the first floor of the house. The detention pond maximum water surface elevation (WSE) is another important elevation to consider. The max WSE for detention ponds should always be called out on the construction drawings for each detention pond. Previously the house slabs had to be only a minimum of 1 - 1.5 feet above the max WSE. As you can imagine, for a house to flood and get 2-3 feet of water in it, the rainfall likely far exceeded the 100 Year rainfall intensity. New regulations are working to prevent new homes and businesses from flooding, even for a 500 Year rainfall event and perhaps even for the 1,000 Year rainfall event.

I've been working in land development and site development in Houston since 2003 so I've had a lot of experience with designing detention ponds.

Generally speaking a detention pond will not adversely affect a house's value provided the pond is maintained properly.  Due to Harvey, the City of Houston, Harris County, and Fort Bend County have especially increased storm sewer design requirements.  Included in this is increased detention storage rates for storm water runoff.  Part of the new regulations is that the minimum slab elevation has to be 2 feet higher than the 500 Year Base Flood Elevation (BFE).  In the past it was only required to have the slab 1 foot (or 1.5 foot for some areas) higher than the 100 Year BFE.  So no agency (federal, state, or local) really regulated what would happen with all that extra water when a storm hit that exceeded the 100 Year Storm.  Well that has now changed.  So for new neighborhoods, the new houses could be many feet higher (2'-4' higher generally speaking) than the houses that were built in an previous Section just a year or two before.  This is the first drastic change to drainage requirements since Allison in 2001. So that's part of the reason why you don't see a lot of detention ponds near houses 30+ years old but you do see a lot of ponds in subdivisions with houses 20 years old and newer.  Whether newer or older, most detention ponds were required to have an "extreme event overflow structure" in the design so you can see exactly what the design intent was for the particular pond your looking at.  You can typically get the construction drawings for these ponds from the City, County, or MUD as these are public records. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to let me know as I could talk on this for days.  I'm a civil engineer and I work for Jones and Carter.

I only have 5 rentals in Baton Rouge, (where I'm originally from - Geaux Tigers!), but I plan on buying 2 next year in Katy or Cypress.  I just joined BP a couple months ago and I haven't even had a chance to find a local meet up yet so if anyone knows of any near Memorial or Bellaire, please let me know.  This is my first BP post - sorry it's so long.