All Forum Posts by: John Lenhart

@Jeff D. We use a company called Value Payment Systems. They offer debit, credit and echeck payment online. We also allow echeck through our property management system. We like the Value Payment Systems better than most other sites like Venmo and even our property management software payment portal because they offer the online debit card payment at a more affordable rate.

Most everyone else charges 2%-3% a payment with Visa or MasterCard and they offer a flat fee around $5.00 paid by the tenant. Their system allows tenants to pay online via a personalized website and also offers mobile access. You get a daily report indicating who paid in excel form that can be downloaded into most property management software. If this is something that may interest you let me know and I am happy to send you my account reps info.

@Kurt S. Where is your duplex? Seeing that you are in Oxford, is this college property?

We owned some college property in a gentrifying neighborhood. 4 years ago, our college tenants were causing some vandalism with a run down old house and upsetting the owner (who was absentee). He agreed to sell us the house for 14k on a land contract for 10 years. We took control and rented the house for 3 years and then sold it to another investor for 50k on another land contract 3 years later. THis took no money out of pocket and was a very nice return.

Brandon - I would talk with your attorney on this issue. It has been a long time since I did anything with securities but I always learned that when it comes to advertising it is always best to err on the side of caution. Too many people have gotten into trouble with a simple mistake in wording which opened the door to a claim under the securities act.

That being said, if you study a number of websites, you can probably find disclaimer language that they use on their website to limit liability and indicate that it is meant for advertisement purposes and not an offer to sell securities.   If you find language on other sites you like, make sure to run it by your securities attorney first to make sure that it has all the required language you would need in a disclosure.  

@Guy Azta the one rule in ohio regarding a RUBS is that you can't profit off of it. Therefore, you want to try and use it to recoup 80-90% of the bill to keep you out of trouble. Also, if you have Section 8 units you can't do this on those units

@guy  why not just move to a RUBS system to charge back water consumption to your tenants. It is easier and much more cost efficient than drilling a well. This is very common in the Cincinnati market as all the large operators are using it and many of the smaller operators are starting to . We are looking into it ourselves for some of our buildings. Point being, it has been around long enough in the market that tenants are not necessarily scared of it and it is the easiest thing to implement for your unit. 

As for coin laundry, I know Cincinnati coin and Great Lakes both offer a high efficiency model. If you lease your machines they can certainly help you. 

@Sam Guarnieri - This is a very general question to answer. However, if you are looking for places to get educated on self storage you should check out Scott Meyers courses. He is the expert in the industry and also at self storage education.  

Apartments are easier to manage than Single Family. Definitely can be done with a full time day job. Just need to be good at automating and systems.

@Earnest Boyd where in Dayton is your property? what areas of Dayton are you looking to invest?

where you can, I would want them on your paper vs the old management company paper. This way, you can ensure that they are bound by your rules and not prior rules.

Your issue, which I would talk to an attorney is that you would have to get the tenants to agree to sign a new lease if they are currently in a year lease. You could probably convince them to do so because the inducement of month to month is often appealing to many tenants.

If they refuse to sign a new lease, and the current lease is illegible and missing pages, you would want an affidavit from the prior owner to at least affirm the terms of prior lease. If he does not want to give that to you, you could force the issue in other ways but it could be more expensive on your end.

Consult with your attorney but at the end of the day, if you want the person out bad enough, you can come up with numerous ways to accomplish this goal.