All Forum Posts by: Matt Kowske

@Carlos Rovira, did you ever find a VA? I am also looking for a bilingual VA that would be available to take tenant calls. Let us know what you found in your researchm, thanks.

Hello all,

I am interested in others experiences with the PM companies in Madison. I am looking at handing off two of our properties but am having a difficult time finding a company with a decent reputation I would be comfortable with. Can anyone comment on their experiences? Thanks.

A lot of good stuff in this thread! Thanks everyone.

I am in a similar position. We self-managed a SFR for 2 years without much time or trouble. This year we bought a 12 unit and a 4 unit and inherited an on-site property manager who gets paid way too much and does way too little.

I'm technically not "self managing" those yet but still spend a lot of time on those two properties. We plan to scale back his duties (and his pay) and take over the majority of PM, but I am hesitant to do so because I don't know what kind of time it will take. I also worry about finding and screening good tenants. With our SFR we only had to do this once and it worked out fine, but with so many more units I am nervous about it.

So I started talking with local PM companies in town. They all had a great sales pitch and they all have terrible reviews from people online. Honestly, I would love to be more hands off and let a PM company take care of it -- but I also don't want to see my properties run with disrepect and my tenants unhappy. 

So, when you want to hire a 3rd party but all of your options suck, what do you do?

I have switched to using Buildium from GnuCash (similar to QB) for our properties. Buildium is great but the accounting part of it feels more like an after thought added on to a property management software. It works, but it isn't the best.

In particular it is clearly designed for use in a prop. management company that does not actually own the properties it manages. If you use it this way (keep your property management separate from your investing business) I think it works very well. I don't have these finances separated however, so there are some quirks.

For example, my properties show a very large negative balance for "Cash Balance" because they all have mortgages. I just have to ignore that part of the software -- 

No quite the opposite. Buildium is not as featured as GC is for accounting, but it is great for property management tasks.

@Adam Hopkins, 

The main thing with GC is there are no "tags" or "categories" like you might find in Quicken so it isn't as easy to separate your CoA into different rental properties. What I did was create a separate hierarchy of accounts for each rental property. Something like this:

123 Main St - Assets

 * Intangible Assets

 ** Closing Costs

 ** ...

 * Prepaid Expenses

 ** Property Tax Escrow

 ** ...

 * Property

 ** Accumulated Depreciation

 ** Purchase Price

 ** Building Improvements

 ** ...

123 Main St - Liabilities

 * Current Liabilties

 ** ...

 * Long Term Liabilities

 ** 1st Mortgage

 *...

123 Main St. - Income

 * Rental Income

 * Coin-op

 * ...

123 Main St. - Expenses

 * Operating Expenses

 ** Repairs

 ** Cleaning

 ** ...

 * Non-operating expenses

 ** Interest

 ** ...

You get the idea. I would have a hierarchy like this for each property I own. The initial setup is tedious as I haven't found a way to import this hierarchy for a new property.

Also, I love GC but moved to Buildium for the property management aspect of it. It lacks the true accounting functionality of GC which I miss.

We are considering installing a PVC (PermaSeal Gold) roof onto a 4-unit building. The warranty is for 20 years but the roofer selling to us thinks it will last 30 or more on this building. Do you have any experience with this product? Thanks!

Could someone explain the concept of "preferred return" in plain English? I've found a few posts on this in past threads but I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. 

Lets say everyone gets a return of say, 10%, of their contributed capital. Beyond this amount the extra cash is split to be weighted in favor of giving the active partner a higher percentage. 

I ran this a couple different ways and it seems to only really work when we both contribute 50/50 to the down payment. If we use less of our own money then it really doesn't look like a good deal for us anymore, but I'm probably doing something wrong. I attached a screenshot of my #s for a 10% preferred return, 100k down payment split 33/66 and a 70/30 split for the "extra" return beyond the 10%. It assumes a 15% CoC return for the property.

Any suggestions on how to make this work? I can lower the preferred rate to 8% and then we have about the same Final RoR... but we should be getting more I think, considering we do all the work in managing and finding properties.

Anyone going to this? 

http://www.aascw.org/

When I go to start a new discussion in the Wisconsin forum, it does not appear in the list of possible choices. Does this require a pro membership?