All Forum Posts by: Miller McSwain

I had intentions to switch to RentRedi from Innago SOLEY because of the maintenance feature they have. For additional fees, you can have a 3rd party handle maintenance calls, handle the maintenance issue, and bill you afterward. You can even enable this feature temporarily while you are on vacation.

I tested RentRedi out and also couldn't make the switch because the lease signing lacked pre-poulated fields. I was unwilling to sacrifice this feature that I love in Innago. I also disliked that I couldn't make a custom application, but I could let this slide since I require that applicants fill out a custom Google Form anyway.

I'm hopeful that they will address these issues soon! Until then, I'll stick with Innago which has served me very well 😀

I can see where managing many rent-by-room rentals could become challenging like @Garrett Christensen mentioned. It may still be worth it though.
My wife and I have a single rent-by-room (5 bedrooms) property, and we bring in ~$750/room. So $750x5=$3750/month while traditional rents would be ~$1800/month. So we are receiving DOUBLE the long-term rate.
Well worth the squeeze in my market 👍

There have been some great tips posted.
In addition, we have a video tour of the property that we upload to YouTube and share in the listing description.
We are renting by the room, and all 4 of our tenants moved in without taking a physical tour. Most of them were coming from out-of-state, and if we didn't have a video tour that they could view remotely, they likely would have passed on our property.

So having that video could open your listing up to people moving from out-of-state 👍

@Sanat Bhandari

Thanks! I see.

Ideally, we won't have to use the loan (with concessions and such). 

I'll talk to my lender of course. But if we can take the loan out in time to season the funds, we consider the DTI impact, and we consider the credit score impact, then it COULD be a method to acquire sooner?

Thanks for your help!

There are lots of property management softwares. I'm a single-family investor, and I recently looked through the most popular softwares and selected one. The products I investigated were:
1. Tenant Cloud
2. Apartments.com
3. Innago
4. Avail
5. RentRedi

I was looking for a software that met the following criteria:
1. Online payments from tenants
2. Automatic late fees
3. Maintenance request portal
4. Free for the landlord
5. Online applications
6. Tenant screening (background checks, etc)
7. Lease signing
8. Ability to post vacancies in the software

I found that Innago was the only one to meet all these requirements. It does charge a $2 fee for each rent payment, but that is charged to the tenant by default. I haven't had any complaints from tenants about this charge.

The other softwares were pretty good, but here are the deal breakers for each.
Tenant Cloud: Tenants cannot setup autopay unless we have the paid version
Apartments.com: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
Avail: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
RentRedi: No free version AT THE TIME

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, RentRedi is free now if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use. I did try it out recently, and the only thing holding me back is their lease signing feature. It doesn't prefill any of the lease for you. With Innago, for example, I uploaded my lease and indicated where my name, the tenant's name, checkboxes, etc need to be automatically filled. RentRedi doesn't prefill anything, which is a timesuck and a killer for me :(

We are currently in our first house-hack and will be eligible to purchase our 2nd HH in April (because it will have been 1 year since we purchased the first one). It looks like we will likely have around $20,000 saved, but we will need around $37,000 to close with 5% down + fees in our market. Ideally, we would purchase as soon as eligible so that the 1-year timer for our 3rd house-hack stays on track, and for the 4th, etc.

I'm considering using a personal loan (like Rocket Loans) to get a ~$17k loan to help us finish off the funds needed for purchase. They offer 5 year loans at ~10% interest, which ended up being a ~$400/month payment. We are renting by room so we have increased rental income to support this extra payment, and the numbers still pencil out.

Has anyone done this before? Would I have to let the loan funds season in my bank account for 2 months? Any other considerations?
Thanks!

There are lots of property management softwares. I'm a single-family investor, and I recently looked through the most popular softwares and selected one. The products I investigated were:
1. Tenant Cloud
2. Apartments.com
3. Innago
4. Avail
5. RentRedi

I was looking for a software that met the following criteria:
1. Online payments from tenants
2. Automatic late fees
3. Maintenance request portal
4. Free for the landlord
5. Online applications
6. Tenant screening (background checks, etc)
7. Lease signing
8. Ability to post vacancies in the software

I found that Innago was the only one to meet all these requirements. It does charge a $2 fee for each rent payment, but that is charged to the tenant by default. I haven't had any complaints from tenants about this charge.

The other softwares were pretty good, but here are the deal breakers for each.
Tenant Cloud: Tenants cannot setup autopay unless we have the paid version
Apartments.com: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
Avail: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease
RentRedi: No free version AT THE TIME

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, RentRedi is free now if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use.

Also, I think Innago just added bookkeeping features, but we use Stessa (free) which specializes in rental property bookkeeping. It is simple and has worked well for us 👍

We have a rent-by-room rental. In our experience, all tenants have been 20's males working professional jobs (engineers, teachers, military officers) that are typically recent college grads looking to save money. So if you are in a city with a university and that has companies hiring lots of college grads, that is likely a pretty good indicator.

The rent for RbR can be a good bit higher, so definitely continue to investigate it.
For the quick/dirty analysis, I found that RbR rent is about 1.5x the traditional long-term rate in my market. So I'd start by getting the long-term rate since there are lots of services that offer that data (BP Rent Estimator, Rentometer, Zillow). Then I'd multiply that rate by 1.5x and divide by the number of rooms to get an estimate for each room's rate. So if the long-term rate was found to be $2000 for a 5bd house, $2000x1.5=$3000. $3000/5=$600 per room.
If the numbers were decent for the rough analysis, I'd do some more research by looking around on Facebook marketplace, Roomies, Roomster to get a better idea of the room rates in the neighborhood.

Hopefully this helps!

I am currently rent-by-room house-hacking.

I was in a similar situation as you. There was very little supply and high demand for small multifamily properties in my market, so I turned to rent-by-room because you basically turn a single-family house (that costs less than a multifamily) into multiple "units" by having multiple tenants.

In our case, we just pay for all utilities and have the rents increased a bit to compensate. Otherwise, you'd have to get billed, then divide up the total, then bill the tenants. OR you would have to have one of the tenants get billed, then they would have to chase everyone else down every month for their portion. Just paying for utilities yourself is much less of a headache.

Yes, we have a rental agreement that is a little different than for a traditional long-term rental. The main difference is just that the lease describes their private areas (bedroom, private bath if applicable) and the shared areas (living room, kitchen, etc) and their responsibilities for each.

Something else to think about. It may be worth providing thinking about ways to reduce tenant conflict. For example, we label/assign all shelves in the fridge, pantry, and freezer. That way, it is less likely for someone's food to get stolen, AND when a roommate moves out, we can just sweep their whole shelf into the trash.
Also, we provide all shared supplies (toilet paper for shared bathrooms, dish soap, trash bags, etc). That way tenants don't have to worry about if it is their turn to purchase a supply.

@Daniel Uchimoto

There are some MTR specific sites in addition to Furnished Finders.

Check out kopa.co and consider listing on Airbnb with a 30 day minimum stay!