All Forum Posts by: Nathan Miller

If you are starting out, I would recommend keeping it local.  If all the MF are in bad markets, that makes SF look a lot more attractive.

In the long-run, MF will likely cash flow sooner, but you have harder tenants to deal with.   SF cash flows later, with better tenants.  A lot of it is just landlord style.  

A lot of people might think this is a negative, but your tenant is doing you a favor letting you know what's wrong with the place.  Not all of those items need to be addressed (ie, oven light), but some of them that are a landlords responsibility would be a good idea to address asap.  The gutters if full are going to be damaging your house for instance.

I would reply thanking them for the list and let them know you'll be addressing all the items that are the landlord's responsibility.  IF later on they demand you fix their things (like burnt out lights), it's time to place a better tenant in there.

Title company should be able to walk you through this.  Otherwise, you could just go to records at the courthouse and pay a few dollars to have it recorded.  Varies by county, but that's how easy it is in Oregon.

Maybe intern at a local property management company or realtor's office?  I'd suggest the property management company because you an get a good idea of teh good and bad of real estate investing.  It's not for everybody, but if you can handle it, the rewards are amazing.

Single most important bit of advice I can lend is that once you have your first rental be sure to screen your tenants thoroughly.  It only takes one bad tenant to wipe out 3+ years of profits.  As a landlord you will be entitled to directly order credit, criminal, and eviction reports on your prospective tenants.

Good luck!

The answer here is simple, look at Sunriver, Oregon.   You get the best of summer (rafting, river, biking, hiking) and winter (Mt Bachelor).  Plus the fall and spring is beautiful there too which makes it rentable all year long.  No seasonal drops.  I see most houses rent for $300-$1200/night on abnb.

Zillow tends to be pretty accurate around here if there's lots of comps and sales. It works well for the 3br/2ba SFH, but not so well for anomalies like lots of land or lots of bedrooms.

Well, I had a link on there that explained all the problems in Seattle, but BP mods appear to have removed it.  If the information doesn't already exist on BP they don't like anybody linkingto outside reference material anymore.  Not sure I'm wild about their overzealous moderation policies.

Stop them from smoking weed, nope.  But stop them from smoking it on your property, yes.. sorta.  Even if it's legal in your state it's still illegal federally.  So you have in your lease that they need to obey all laws, state and federal. 

Do weed smokers obey their lease rules related to smoking in a property.?.?  rarely.  Be prepared to have an acceptable deposit to cover smoke damage.

Nothing that I remember the links to..  probably just fud on CNN and such.