All Forum Posts by: Nathan Miller

@Mike Lalor  ACH is the standard for landlords.  It withdraws the money from the tenant (or parent's) checking account and deposits it into yours a few days later.  It's the same system mortgage companies use to do auto payments, and utility companies do for automatic payments.  It's just like a check, but all electronic.  And some services will let you do an automated recurring ACH so you set it and forget it.  There's a number of solutions out there for landlords to do this inexpensively too.  I'm in the industry, so I won't make any recommendations (as they could be biased), but googling "tenant ach payments" will give you a number of options to explore.

This is going to vary by state and I'm curious what any GA Realtors would say.  Are you represented by a Realtor?  If so, they should have an answer for you.  You might also check with the inspector as he would have heard if this sort of thing happens around there.

I do suspect however if the disclosures were misleading, you have a legal case to get your money back.  The question is, would it be worth the time/effort?

Hi Mike, a lot of college students have their rents paid for by their parents, and in my experience the parents of college students are fantastically reliable.  They usually want some automation though, so if you can provide an easy way for the parents to pay (online or automated ACH) that's going to help you attract the good ones.

College students will have less than stellar (if any) credit.  It's fairly common to require a co-signer for college students though since their income isn't going to meet your criteria and you then run their parents credit and use that as your basis for qualification.

For prior evictions and criminal, those are still extremely important to run on the students.

It's also quite common for there to be multiple students sharing a house, so handling split-responsibility for the payments is also another very common thing to do in college housing.

Starting a website is pretty easy these days.  I actually just started using Google Domains (google it).  It's in beta, but they will help you register a domain and have built-in links to website design apps.  It's really super easy.  You can also take the wordpress route and customize a blog to look like a website.  It really just depends on your purpose for the website.  Tell us more about what you want to accomplish.

Are these all foreclosures you've made offers on then Shawn?  It's a bit frustrating that the banks continue manipulating the markets.  I'd love to see a nice steady release rather than doing it in buckets.

Craigslist is a great place to start.  Around here people look at Craigslist before almost anything else.  I've seen a trend towards some of the rental listing sites like Zillow, Trulia, Rent.com, etc lately too.   A couple years ago there were 3 or 4 of them, now there's at least 10 big ones.  The best bet is if you have software that syndicates to those services, just do that and get your vacancies out there in front of as many people as possible as quickly as possible.  Otherwise doing them all by hand can be time consuming.  Start with the biggest first and work your way down..  Craigslist, Zillow, Trulia, etc.....