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All Forum Posts by: Jonathan Greene

Jonathan Greene has started 268 posts and replied 6424 times.

Post: First time Multi-Unit owner-advice and recommendation

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

My landlords manage with Azibo, and we do tenant screening with RentSpree, but there are a lot of similar products out there. Whey are you looking into a HELOC a month before closing on your first property? You shouldn't be ripe for a HELOC for at least a couple of years.

Post: Best Resources For Commercial Real Estate Rookies

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

Look up @Blake Dailey. He runs the Boutique Hotel Conference and puts out a lot of content on hotels. You can see how a lot of people in this area started small and are going bigger.

Post: Mortgage Note Investing

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

You want to connect with @Chris Seveney. This is his wheelhouse.

Post: New Investor looking to purchase their first property

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

Welcome. There are several steps before evaluating deals, but you may have done them. Do you have your finances in order? Do you have a pre-approval or proof of funds ready? You want to have your financial house in order so you know what you CAN afford and what you SHOULD spend. Those are different things. You don't want to overstretch on the first one.

In terms of evaluating quality deals, you won't know what those are for a while so you want to get as many reps looking at properties as possible. You also want to go to real estate investor meetups to get reps with people who do what you want to do. Good luck!

Post: What's the best way to find multifamily properties?

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

Use an app like DealMachine or Propstream. Build a list on ListSource. Write handwritten, honest letters. Focus on absentee owners and start with the ones who live the farthest away and only own one property in the area since they have the least use for the property.

You can also drive for dollars, looking for anomalies of disrepair and then look them up in the tax records and use a site like Spokeo to do cheap skip tracing.

Post: SFH investment 1031 into MFH investment/primary?

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

If you are moving into it, I don't think you can do a 1031. @Dave Foster will confirm, this is all he does. You can go investment SF to investment MF, but not from investment to primary I think.

Post: Capital Gains from the person selling to me

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

This is the ideal scenario for seller finance. The seller becomes the bank and pays capital gains one time on the downpayment (which keeps it low to make sense for them) and then also monthly on the payments (also incentivized to just match how much he wants a month). You can pay them more using seller finance. They set the price, you set the terms.

Post: If You Are Asking These Questions About Your STR, You Are Already Failing

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603
Quote from @Nathan Gesner:

The rating systems for short-term rentals has lost all validity. I stayed in a STR with over 200 5-star ratings, and not a single negative. The rental had ratty furniture, a record player prominently featured in the marketing but it had no speakers, missing basics items in the kitchen, lots of drunks in the concrete hallways that reverberated right into the bedroom at 2am, a strong odor of urine outside, and more.

We have super hosts in this forum that have hundreds of 5-star reviews and are masters of the craft, but I look at their rentals and see they don't have any artwork on the walls, decor is basic, they do nothing to make the guest feel welcome, etc. 

I suspect these hosts are buying off bad reviews. Either way, I can't trust them any more.


Fair point. I stayed at a place without a TV. We read the reviews so we brought a projector. The owner took weeks to write a one-line review for me when I sent her several things wrong (broken window handle, A/C not working property, fridge about to break). And she had almost all 5s. But I gave her 5 stars because it was nice and I feel bad giving less. I need to rethink that.

Post: If You Are Asking These Questions About Your STR, You Are Already Failing

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603
Quote from @John Litz:

I am not a fan of the arbitrage system. Sure it can get a person started earlier. However they are missing out on all the revenue a property can generate. Arbitrage is simply transactions. When you analyze a deal as an LTR so you can pivot if necessary, you are in a much stronger position. Owning makes money from cash flow, appreciation, depreciation on taxes and write offs for your taxes. 
Your tech stack is critical. If you're trying to do everything yourself that is a sure fire way to burn out. Yes some things will require the personal touch. However when done correctly you shouldn't need to write a single message to the majority of guests and still have them feel warm and fuzzy because you have been an attentive host. Get listed on all the OTA's and a direct booking site, use good management software like HostAway, use dynamic pricing software like pricelabs, use WiFi enabled smart locks like Schlage encode, use an email capture system for guests to login to WiFi like stayfi, use those captured emails to do marketing for your direct booking site, and automate scheduling and payments for cleaners and maintenance. The more of the day to day items that can be handled with tech the more you can be freed up to do higher ROI on your time items. Things like acting like a guest searching for a property and seeing how well your property goes to the top of the algorithm or not, as a guest looking at pricing of your property vrs your closest competition, looking at properties that are doing well and seeing what you could be doing better. Listening to YouTube big shots that have great advice on professional ways to handle problematic guests ( most are great but everyone will get bad apples), staying at the property when you have an open window of time and actually get the guest experience (this is critical), and looking at your click thru and conversion rates to get a good baseline.

There is way more work to running an STR than a LTR. Yes good markets are over saturated. But if you're a top operator who cares if the bottom 50% are struggling. You're still getting booked. National occupancy rates are 50-55%. This year I was at 71%. Still not good enough but for my first year not bad at all. This is my first property. I was able to replenish emergency fund money I had to dip into for furnishing, was able to pay off a hot tub, was able to replace 2 garage doors and paid for a larger repair this year. My cash flow for the year was $13k. Nothing fantastic for sure but the property paid for all its own bills and made money with a newbie operator. Next year will be even better with improvement that are constantly getting made as this is not a set it and forget it business.
This hospitality business is not easy money like so many think. But if you’re willing to put in the work it does tend to make significantly more than LTR. Stay focused on providing excellent guest experience and you will stay higher in bookings and revenue. 


All great points here and based on personal experience. I think you definitely need a smart tech stack and to use automation as you said, you just overlay the personal touch and automate the minutia.

Post: I need advice and estimate costs

Jonathan Greene
#5 Starting Out Contributor
Posted
  • Real Estate Consultant
  • Mendham, NJ
  • Posts 6,632
  • Votes 7,603

There are a million other things to consider trying to do STR in a condo. Does the condo complex have rent to own percentage restrictions (they all do, you want to know what percentage is allowed and what percentage it is at now)? Does the condo have STR restrictions (some only allow one-year leases)?

Since you are out of the country and seem inexperienced, when buying condos you also have to assess the viability and strength of the HOA, pending litigation and/or assessments, and parking per unit.