All Forum Posts by: Michael Smythe

You should be able to get another FHA loan due to job relocation.

FHA only requires that you have lived in your current home for at least 12 months before renting it out. You state 7 years, so you should be good.

Run this all by a lender, banks may not want to do it.

What lenders have you already run this by?

@Jake Kid if you find a PMC willing to manage room-by-room, plan on paying them more for the extra headaches involved!

@Sandra Gutierrez no offense, but it's scary that you are asking this question and not more specific DIY management questions.

Do you even have an idea of what you don't know?

What plans are you making to address your missing knowledge?

@Jonathan Leung the biggest challenge of investing in Metro Detroit is figuring out what Class of property/tenant you want to target.

Buying a Class C property and expecting Class A results doesn't work!

Along that same thought process, you should only use a 5% Vacancy Factor for Class A properties. It needs to be higher, to include Tenant NonPerformance, for Class B, even higher for Class C and so on.

Feel free to reach out to us if you want more logical advice:)

@Adam Triplett do NOT rely on programs or others to screen applicants for you - until YOU understand the screening process!

How else will you know if you can trust them or they're screwing you?

@Sumer Forrest what specifically are you looking for?

@Artur A. Most management contracts have an Owner Approval Threshold where the PMC doesn't need owner approval to do the job (unless an emergency).
---It's too time consuming and frustrates tenants to have an owner approve everything.

NOTE: we have a local competitor that is known to break every maintenance request into separate Work Orders, so they all fall under the Owner Approval Threshold. This is ""Death by 1,000 papercuts".  To avoid this, our contract only allows us to have 2 such events/month.

Regarding documentation for repairs, who do you know that doesn't have a cell phone with a camera? So, there's no excuse to take pics/video of before & after work. 
---We're not perfect and some of our ServiceTechs occasionally forget, phone batteries die, or they take worthless pics, or like with a sewer snaking sometimes nothing is pulled out, but we deliver at least 95% of the time.

Regardless, you should automatically be receiving an invoice with a decent description of the work performed.

@Meghan Hunter take your management contract to an EXPERIENCED real estate attorney for advice.

Many are attracted to the low fees this company offers, but find out the hard way that some of their services are lacking.

They use offshore VAs to be able to offer their low fees and some of these VAs don't care.