All Forum Posts by: Michael Plante

When you say they offer assistance with book keeping, does that mean you give them a box of receipts or they give you access to an app and tell you a new roof is CAPEX, not maintenance and expect you to enter the data? That is a big difference. If you decide to leave their services do you loose your data since it is on their app?

For someone just starting out, with nothing, its way overpriced IMO.  Read a book and learn the basics of taxes and accounting.

I enter my own records into the Stessa website and take it to my tax guy.  It takes maybe 2 hours a month to do the data entry.

My tax guy charges me between $350 and $450 to do my taxes. My taxes are sort of complex. 4 rental houses, a 4 unit apartment, and a storage building being rented. 3 houses, one apartment being rehabbed to be rented, but not in operation yet, just tracking costs now. IRA, inherited IRA, ROTH IRA, general investment portfolio, 2 kids starting college this year, one 1 year old. Retirement pension.

He is also available to run numbers for me. For example, I recently wanted to buy a new house, for cash with some combination of my investment portfolio, IRAs, money in the bank, etc. So, knowing my IRAs will need to have taxes paid on what I withdrew, I asked how much I could withdraw, using the new child and dependent tax credit, and the rest of my usual deductions (expenses and depreciation) assuming one more property was put into service this year and not have tp pay taxes. I hate to leave deductions and tax credits on the table, and my personal IRA is very healthy so I prefer to use it over say cash on hand. We discussed possible major expenses with each property, likely income, etc. He ran several scenarios, explained them, and I had an absolutely safe number to withdraw and have no expected taxes to only if you buy 2 new HVACS will you pay not taxes amount. All that work was free! He is available to chat whenever I ask to make an appointment. Now if I showed up every week, I am sure I would be billed something! But 1 or 2 times a year, no problem.

$90 a month when just starting is way over the top!

@Jon Silva

Hey Jon, I am a Realtor and investor in Tampa Florida. I sent you a personal message as well...But, I have been a part of over 50 Hard Money loan transactions. You really can't use, or really recommend to use Hard Money on a long term hold. The terms are typically 1 year. You would use it to purchase and renovate then refi out ASAP. The cost of using Hard Money is considerably higher than a conventional loan. You pay interest only payment for the duration of the loan. Most require that you keep the loan a minimum of 90 days but usually don't have any prepayment penalties after their specific time frame. You pay points right off the bat, along with closing costs. Here is an example: they will loan up to 70% to ARV. ARV is $100,000. So they will lend you $70,000 for your deal. So, your purchase price and renovations have to be less than 70% of the ARV or $70,000. Then they will fund 80% of the purchase price. So, if the purchase price of the house is $50,000 you will have to bring the $10,000 down payment plus their fee, let's say 10 points of the loan value, so an additional $7,000 plus closing costs to the table. Then you pay interest only payments at 10% so $700 a month just to carry the loan. This can eat away at your profits. This is what I have seen personally. Once you become a more seasoned investor, they will up your ARV percentage. You also, have to show tax returns, pay stubs, credit reports and have a deal that fits their criteria to even get the loan.

We provide a cheap shower curtain that costs somewhere around four bucks with the heavy-duty shower liner that's currently 13 bucks at Big Lots. We make a point of taking our marketing pictures with these in place. We also provide curved shower rods whenever possible and at least headshower-handshower combos. I have shower towers with water jets in place in some of my rentals and external bar shower systems in others. I have $800/month rentals with oversized tubs and $900 Grohe Euphoria shower systems in them.

I think most landlords completely underestimate how much goodwill a nice shower well above a rental's price point buys them for the money spent, especially down in C-class where most setups are utterly bare bones, cramped, and seemingly purposely designed to be uncomfortable. I also rent mostly to people in health care. They tend to pay attention to things like this.

I also believe that with my current business model, the fact that I do all my own maintenance means that I can provide something many others struggle with. It's an unsubtle chance to differentiate my portfolio and my product. Taking advantage of these opportunities to shine is what keeps turnover down and the quality tenants I want in place in my properties over the long haul.

Hey Kushaal, yea I will be refinancing a couple to pull cash out for down payment cash, but don’t have enough equity to pull out enough to buy something without financing.  What is this 203k you speak of? If house hacked a lot and was hoping to move away from that but I’m always open to continuing. All properties are cash flowing very well above average and I have an almost 100% occupancy rate over the past few years.  Credit score is excellent with 0 missed payments.  Thanks 

afternoon team, i am still working on building my database of mobile home park owners in the south east region.  i have had good success retrieving the property owners information by using the county gis websites but have also ran into quite a few roadblocks regarding owners who use an attorney as the only agent of an llc.  Has anyone found a way to track down contact information for owners that use attorneys or even a management company as the registered agents of the llc who will not give this information out for obvious reasons?