All Forum Posts by: Rob L.

@Clinton Holmes Ray was pretty spot on.

I would add it really depends on what your doing. For many real estate investors, the trouble of forming and maintaining a LLC isn't worth protection from the theoretical threat of a lawsuit. It costs just over $500 a year for the LLC thru the state and then $200-500 for tax filing, so it can be pretty costly.

What really matters is this, 

How much equity do you have in the property? Is it enough to spend almost $1,000 a year to protect? 

Are you investing with Other peoples money/partners? 

Personally, we setup a trust for for each property (for privacy) and then have a LLC as the beneficiary. We have a couple different LLCs that we use depending on whose invested. Me and my wife have one for our properties and then ones where we have partners invested in as well.

Ultimately, nothing beats having a great real estate lawyer and getting advice from them on what your trying to accomplish. 

Hey Hunter, congrats on moving forward with the 1st property! 

I'm curious if you have talked to a good real estate attorney yet? I ask because from my experience we structure the LLC based off of the needs of each investment and the investors involved. I usually tell our lawyer what were looking to do and they advise us on the best way to structure it.

I bet you could get some great referrals for lawyers in the area on here too. 

@John K.

We use appfolio for our property management system and it allows us to customize our applications and once prospective tenants apply online we get notified. We can then run a full background and credit check with a click of a button. 

Its more expensive then other systems out there but from a scale ability standpoint I think its the best. Our productivity is through the roof because everything we do is in the cloud and available on the fly. 

Like Andrew mentioned we cant charge a application fee in the state of mass so we eat the background/credit check fee but that's just a cost of doing business in our lovely state. 

I took a quick look over your pro forma and I would note your water expense looks low. With 4 units and you mentioned most have w/d in unit and dishwashers. Your actual water bill may be 2X or 3X what you quoted. I would reach out to the town and they should be able to supply the history. 

I've had the best luck with Listsource, as Russell mentioned you can customize the list however you want. For what your trying to do I think thats your best bet.

Hey @Todd Maki,

Welcome to Biggerpockets! I would run this in the rental calculator and see what it tells you, thats usually a great start. 

Just curious, are you planning to rent it out monthly or have you thought about have it as a vacation rental? 2 min walk to the beach wasnt sure if there was a demand for that, could help with cash flow if so.

Hello Everyone, 

So I'm curious what other Massachusetts investors have done with their LLC's. I was recently told by our lawyer that we should setup a different LLC for each group of investors. So for a little background were buying a new property and two other partners are involved. One of which we already own a property with and the other it will be our first property together. We plan on buying 2-3 properties a year and each property we could have new investors so it could quickly snowball to a ridiculous amount of LLC's and way to much money going to the state for each one....

There has to be a better way for us to do this. I've heard Series LLCs are not recognized by the state of mass so do we just bite the bullet and setup one LLC for each property or is there a better way out there?

Any input would be greatly appreciated, Thanks! 

Also, if anyone has any rockstar RE lawyers  they recommend that would be great too!        

@Tamara Taylor Here's a great link I've used in the past, 

https://www.masshousing.com/portal/server.pt/community/property_managers/239/fair_housing_resources/396

Hey @Derreck Wells, its a 3 family.

We have a multi under contract right now and we just had a quote for over $16,000 for lead abatement....ouch. But, I've found it increases the value of the property because a lot of government assistance programs require lead certs if tenants have children under 6 years of age. So having the apartments lead free enables you to get top dollar for rent. 

The problem is many landlords rent and sell properties by simply saying the existence of lead is unknown...but the fact is you can look up most properties right Here. It creates a gray area that endangers kids and new property owners that don't understand the law. 

I'm not sure about everyone else but unless the property has lead certs we have a lead inspection done on every property we have under contract during the inspection period and we use the findings to help our negotiations.