Financial Freedom One House At A Time
A big fat jacket Last week, we made an analogy between how you protected yourself from the elements as a kid when you played in the snow and how you should use that same logic to protect your assets. Both should be done in layers. We talked about layers commonly used to protect financial assets — things like corporations and how the corporate shield is a great line…
Why do an in-home interview? We have three properties on market right now for rent, and the quality and amount of applications coming in is great. This is a stark difference from the craziness we experienced in late fall of last year. Then, we had 200 applications submitted for just one property. And of those, only 20 percent were filled out completely, but most of the applicants didn’t meet…
Enough is too much Rent is due on the first and late after the fifth of the month, according to most residential leases. On the sixth, a letter of demand should be issued to any tenant who has not paid. That letter should read something like this: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Tenant, The purpose of the letter is to let you know that we did not receive…
Do your tenants meet your core values? We recently welcomed a business consultant by the name of Gary Harper into our office. Gary is with Sharper Business Solutions, and He and his wonder wife Susan, helped us with a number of things ranging from writing out a vision for our company to properly defining all of our departments. They also helped us set up an accountability chart for those…
Fighting for rental space This year has been very strange as far as rentals go. First off, rent rates have skyrocketed. In 2018, we have seen two-bedroom, one-bath houses rent for as much as 3/2 floorplans were renting for just two years ago. With the spike in rent prices, odd things have started happening. For instance, we’ve had con artists trying rent people our houses. In previous…
So, we recently had tenant applicants do some things that were new to us. One walked out of the lease-up, and the other called us rude. Let me explain what happened and why each instance was actually good. The first one happened on a Tuesday. We’d been trying to find the right tenant for a vacancy we have up in Dalton. We found some people who looked great…
So, you bought a house that you plan to hold as a rental property. You did a great rehab and really have it looking nice. Now it’s time to put it on market and get the rent money coming in. As you begin to look for tenants, I want to caution you on something. Landlords tend to use their application process to see if a tenant can…
Every industry has expenses associated with the cost of doing business. In real estate, however, those cost may not be as apparent, especially for new and aspiring investors. I know this because I got to explain some of those expenses to two different investors involved in two different deals this week. I would like to talk you through both scenarios so you’ll be better prepared to account for…
I went to pull my iPhone out of my pocket at a house the other day. My phone tumbled out of my fingers and began to topple toward the floor. I have pretty good reflexes, though, so I brought my right foot up and caught the phone in the same manner one would stall a soccer ball or hacky sack. That particular action may sound odd for this…
I had an interesting time with contractors last week. We have five rehabs going right now, which means we are dealing with lots of contractors and many different schedules. And last week’ workflow was, well, inefficient at best. I had one contractor go MIA. I chose that term because we didn’t know he was gone. He normally goes out, works and sends us his invoice when he is…