All Forum Posts by: Kevin Harrison

In a situation with grease I would have it jetted and camera'd. I would also as the tenants to not put any grease down the drain. let them know once it has been camera'd, pumped, and jetted, that anything after that is on them.

Best of luck!

Im on the opposite side of the fence from David. If the units are not presentable and you are planning on doing some mid level upgrading then I would not show them until they are completed. It would be a waste of time in my opinion because the rents you are going to want will not be justified by the appearance of the unit and most people don't have the vision to see what they will look like.

If anything I would list them towards the end of the remodel as "coming soon" along with a picture of the outside of the building and a picture of the floor plan. This should drum up some interest of people who know they are going to be moving, and shorten your re-lease time as you should have a pool of interested parties by the time they are ready.  

IMO I would say that your tenant is right to not want to take care of the whole yard. Just because the other tenant moved this should not mean that their work load increases. I venture to say you will need to cover it until you get a new tenant.

In the future you might want to write in specific areas of the yard that each tenant is responsible for.

I had posted this on another forum of BP and did not get any responses. Please chime in and tell me what you think, and where I got it wrong. I am hoping we can help some people here and better my writing at the same time.

I see this question every day at least once on the forums so I thought I would answer it for the majority of people. I was going to make this a blog post but couldn't figure out how to do it. What I am going to outline in this post to the best of my ability is the question YOU and only you can answer to find the answer to this question. Feel free to chime in if you think I missed anything or got it wrong.

The first questions you need to answer are...

1) What is your home worth as a rental, and what is your home worth at Fair Market Value?

This is going to entail doing some research, looking up what similar homes in your area have sold for recently (as in the last 6 months). Note that you cannot go off of what people are asking for their homes right now but what they have ACTUALLY sold for recently. As well as looking up what similar homes in your area are renting for. This is where you have to be truly honest with yourself as to what your home is in quality, size, layouts, amenities, etc. I know that 5 bedroom down the block is renting for $2200 a month but let’s be honest here. Your home only has 4 bedrooms that are up to code and is a half bath short of the one down the block, and its only going to rent for about $1800. See? Honesty... You can short cut some of this by paying to have your house appraised or talking to a local relator who knows the market and can give you a fair and unbiased estimate of these numbers.

You figured our your numbers yet? Alright, lets move on to the next step.

The next question is actually several that all somewhat overlap.

1) Can you rent your home out for a profit or at least break even? Not just on your PITI but on all your actual HONEST expenses (IE. CapEx, Vacancy, Maintenance, Property management, and any other expenses you know are going to come up). BP has quite a few useful calculators to figure this out that you can use a limited number of times a week, unless you are a pro member and then they are unlimited. Another way to think about this question is “Would you buy this home as a rental if you did not already own it?”

2) Can you afford to sell your house? Can you walk away with a profit or at least break even? This means you can afford to cover the mortgage payments while the home is on the market, or you have enough equity to drop the price some from the market price to get the home sold faster, and you have enough equity to cover closing costs without having to write a check at closing instead of receiving one.

3) Are you looking to buy another house when you move? Do not forget to consider that it will take 6 months – 2 years before many lenders will consider your rental income as part of your actual income, and even then they will typically only count 75% of the rental income. This will mess up your Debt To Income ratio and can prevent you from buying another house if it skews that percentage too high.

OK class, by now you should know if you CAN rent your home out or if you NEED to sell. This answers the bulk of the questions right? Next thought is that just because you CAN rent your home out when you move does not make it necessarily a good idea. Here are some other things to take into consideration before you make the leap as a rental.

1. How far are you moving? If it’s far, are you comfortable self-managing from a distance? Or do you need property management? Can you be ok with letting someone else run your property? If not then you should most likely still sell and use that money to get a new rental property closer to where you are moving.
2. Do you have some cash reserves to get you started? You don’t necessarily need to have a full CapEx reserve stored up, but you need to have enough that if something major breaks (IE. Water heater, HVAC, etc.) right after you move you have enough to cover it.
3. Does your home make a good rental? A 1/1 is great in an urban area but not so much in the suburbs, and likewise a 6 bedroom home in somewhere that's not a collage town is most likely going to give you some trouble getting rented out.
4. Is your home in rent ready shape? Just because you are use to having to bump the stove to get it to turn on and you know there is that nail sticking out of the wall at the top of the stairs doesn't mean this is tenant ready. Having nice properly working appliances and taking care of these small nusience items are not even upgrades, this is what people will expect when they rent your home.

While I’m sure there are some things that I have forgotten in this list this should give you a good idea of whether or not you should rent your house out or sell it. If you think of anything I got wrong or have forgotten feel free to chime in and let me know. Let’s talk about it.

I agree with @Richard Balsam. I have family in forsythe county, the traffic into ATL is much like DC. You will learn which areas are better and what times of day are better but there will always be some traffic. If I were you I would go with either the long stay hotel or with a very short lease somewhere (IE 6 months or less) until you find a job. Im assuming your wife works and this is why you are moving to that area so please correct me if I am wrong. Once you find a job you can worry about where you're moving to and have some basis of what area to look in.

This is what my wife and I did when we moved from California to DC several years ago even though we knew where we would be working. The last thing you want to do is to buy somewhere you think you want to live only to find out 6mon-1yr later that at best its not ideal or at worst its terrible. where we rented when we first moved here was a nice neighborhood in a not so great area, so while the home and neighbors were great I still had to worry about my wife going to the grocery store etc. by herself in the evening hours.

The good news is that the area surrounding ATL is ripe with duplex, triplex, and quad deals if you are looking to house hack and have another investment when you are done.

I like a nice 3/2 if I had my choice, about 1500sq/ft. Its small enough that one well to do tenant can rent the place but big enough to attract small families, which is my "bread and butter". Small families tend to stay longer and do less damage to the house than tenants that are not families. Typically this is not their first go around with renting and they know the drill. Also as a caveat to that though, this will definitely not hold true with all people. I find that this size home is easy to rent and most tenants stay a minimum of 2 years. I do my renting in GA near a couple of colleges and a military base.

 I don't know how far you live from your units but If you can just drive by there on your way home from work and see what cars are there. if you can document her moms car being there on 7 nights then you have a pretty good case along with what you have told us. and you can bring this to them with an ultimatuim of either put your mom on the lease and figure out your parking or I will file for eviction for breaking the terms of the lease.

This does seem like a small nusience if it is not causing issues now. But now that you know they are feeding you a line of BS, I would let them finish their term there and not renew. Its your call as to how far you want to take this.

bump. I'm surprised that as often as this question gets asked no one looked at this. lets make this a discussion. please tell me what did I miss, what did I get wrong?