All Forum Posts by: Paul M.

Open Office is great. It is not as good as Excel but if you are not using it all day long or working with large amounts of data, it is fine.

The condo association is made up of the owners of the individual units. So they are in charge of maintenance, improvements, budgets, paying bills collecting condo dues, etc.

QB scanning and linking to the software so you can drill down to the receipt invoice is not ready for prime time. Even in large companies implementing that thing is kind of a pain in the *** for some reason.

Just scan your docs out to a folder system.

Don't Do It.

I am an accountant by trade outside of my real estate activities and I have simultaneously mainted the books at companies that used QB online versus QB desktop. QB online is terrible for more reasons that I can count. For the various reasons already mentioned and many more.

This is a 3 unit building that I manage myself and I used to live there, so I know that outdoor secure bike storage would be valuable. Carrying the bike up from the basement is somewhat of a pain. It is an urban area where so not just college students ride bikes.

It is done in my market all the time (2-4 unit buildings are a predominant form of housing). Yes you'll need to setup a condo association with monthly condo fees for each unit. You'll need a lawyer to draw up the condo docs etc.

Anyone have any experience with bike lockers, eg like what you see at transit stations in cities like Seattle or on college campuses. I'm thinking of putting them on my rental property as a tenant amenity.

Some pictures of bike lockers on google images:

http://tinyurl.com/9ckc2b7

For those of you outside major metropolitan areas where houses cost 30-50k, do you run into this sort of problem?

I would take the 250k exclusion for primary residence for the side you live in rather than 1031 for various reasons. That exclusion is permanent, you are not paying 1031 firm fees, you are not locked into finding a 4 plex in the proper amount of time which you might not be able to do.

You also might consider whether holding a property for 2 years is going to be profitable with all the time and expense of transaction costs and getting started.

Those look nice (would like a more close up picture).

I feel like the anti stainless sentiments are often posturing and statements against the run up to the recession. But I don't see people putting in anything other than stainless in the brand new condos in my area. From what I can tell, that is still what people want when they are paying top dollar.