Property Management Blog

To summarize this long post, it is a fair housing violation for landlords to actually be conscious of the source of income type when making a decision to rent a property but once it is rented, we better recognize immediately that the tenant is disabled so we can make a reasonable accommodation to let him/her break the lease with zero noti...

A friend asked me to give a real estate talk recently about tips and tricks to self-manage real estate property for owner-operators.  That’s always an interesting concept; a property management company owner trying to give advice and skills to make their audience less likely to use them.  I recognize from my experience how...

People are generally in one of two camps on real estate, it's all about CAP rates or it's all about cash flow and the cash-on-cash return. It seems that neither is exactly correct, and neither is exactly wrong. When interest rates are really low or you can buy with close to no money down, cash on cash return seems to be ho...

I get asked on a daily basis what the housing market is going to look like in 2022.  In 2020 and 2021, when COVID was in full swing, I made a very non-committal response to this question; “Buy any property you want to hold long term and sell any that you do not.”  With the market so good, selling was a great option, ...

Did you know that our tenants are raving fans of technology? Whether it is the ability to pay rent through our tenant portal or at CVS, 7/11 or Walmart, to put in maintenance requests with photos so we can get the right vendor out the first time, our emergency maintenance line to troubleshoot and triage emergencies right away (even at 2 i...

I have heard many people say that inflation in our housing market will lead to higher interest rates which will ultimately lead to an affordability crisis and a significant drop in housing prices.  I have not seen anything to quantify this so I decided to do just this; determine for a given interest rate, what the purchase price...

Our property management company has been able to help many tenants struggling with the financial crisis.  To date, our company has collected $245,000 to help our owners, equivalent to a full month’s rent of our portfolio.  This has been a blessing to many but now is becoming a curse for the following four reasons.1. We hav...

Did you know that not all credit scores are created equal? I like to tell the story of my all-time favorite tenant.  My favorite tenant had a credit score when I put him into a house I own of less than 600.  While frequently anything below 650 is a definite no for most landlords renting houses, I like to analyze the reason ...

For you to be a great owner/landlord or property manager, you must learn the difference between treating the problem versus the symptom. When a tenant informs them of mice in the property, a good property manager will first get them to lay down traps and see how many are occurring and then treat the property with a professional when deter...

My mom had some sayings which resonate with me and my brothers especially during challenging times.  One saying is that, “It is not what happens that matters, but how you respond to what happens.”  Other famous sayings from our society is, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Too often, something...