Buying A Home
daniella2727
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
If you own a rental property...
Do you use a property management company?
Explain why you do or do not use one.
I am on the fence.
We will be renting our town home out, this is our first time.
We will live 10 minutes from the town home.
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Re: If you own a rental property...
If you live 10 minutes away, do it yourself. There's no reason to pay someone UNLESS:
- you know NO tradesmen who could fix a broken X on short notice (keep a list handy of all the companies you use for everything - HVAC, garage door, pest, lawn care, general handyman)
- you don't trust your ability to do a background check and select a good tenant (I use SmartMove by TransUnion). Arguments can be made that some property mgmt companies do next to nothing to screen tenants, so if this is your concern, really inquire about how the PM company does its screening to see if it's worth your while
- you feel uncomfortable asking/demanding rent or handling the prospect of eviction
We have 2 properties, both of which originally had PMs. One is worth his weight in gold - a true professional who goes above and beyond every day. (When we drove by the house on Black Friday night at 8 pm and the garage was open and no one was home, we called the PM and he went out to check on it.) The other PM company was the best choice out of a sea of awful choices - the tenants they selected did $4k of damage to our house and the PM said it was "normal wear and tear." I now manage that property myself from 4 hours away - it is extremely difficult to do from a distance, but from 10 minutes, it'd be much easier.
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Thinking of doing cosmetic updates to a dated home? These were our costs.
We did but we were out of state. We are buying right now and will be renting out our current house. Since we will only be about 20 minutes or so away, we do not plan on using a management company this time.
ETA: Forgot to explain, lol. We feel since we are so close, it's way easier to handle ourselves. We have a handy man here who can fix things or we can go over ourselves.
We own three rental properties, one in our home state (our old house) and two in the state we moved here from.
We do not use a property manager. DH likes being involved/hands on and doesn't want a "middle-man", nor does he want to pay the fees associated with it.
He's far from a first time landlord, though...he's been doing this for over 15 years and is extremely handy with electrical, plumbing, etc. If a tenant calls him, he can often tell what the problem is just from their description and he has a list of reputable contractors he can call to fix things if necessary. Also, whenever we go "back home" to visit family, he makes sure to stop in at each property for some routine preventative maintenance that really helps cut down on problems. As for finding tenants and doing financial/background checks, he has a short list of good, reputable REAs he chooses from and they handle gathering the paperwork to forward to us.
We've lived away from the two properties for nine years and that's never been a problem for us. He's had to make an emergency trip up there maybe once or twice in that time, otherwise it's been easily handled from here at reasonable costs.
Yes, we live in Iowa and the home is in Florida. We pay a percentage of the rent that comes out to about $75 a month. It's worth every penny to have someone there to handle anything that comes up.
If we lived close, I might try to give it a go on our own and if it wasn't working well, then check out a management company.
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We have numerous properties and all are self managed. DH is a broker so can do all his own tenant screenings. DH's son takes care of minor repairs, painting, landscaping and we have our regular contractors for electrical, plumbing etc.
We recently sold our condo, but rented it out for 2 years. It was 2 miles from DH's work. We didn't use a management company. Husband is handy and we didn't have issues doing legwork ourselves. We found 2 excellent families to rent to over the 2 year period. Credit reports were done. We advertised on craigslist. Maintenance issues tended to pop up right when they'd move in, but then remain quiet for the rest of the lease. So it was work up front, but once they settled in we had no issues. We got a generic lease agreement on-line and adapted it to our needs.
If you are handy, and don't mind doing the work yourself it can be worth it to manage yourself. Getting good tenants is key. Don't rush into having someone move-in.
We do not. Here are the reasons why:
1) We live 10 miles from the rental property. It's not difficult to get there if necessary.
2) We are already renting it at a loss (our rental income is about $350/month less than our expenses). We're only renting because the current real estate market makes it a bad choice to sell the property right now. We don't want to pay a property management company on top of the loss we're already taking.
3) We're renting a condo. All exterior maintenance is already taken care of by the HOA. Many of the major systems in the building (heat, water, etc) are central systems, and are maintained by the HOA. There is very little that we're responsible for as homeowners.
4) Our condo's HOA employs full-time property managers who are on site every day. If there are maintenance issues, the property managers are there to handle problems right away. If there's a problem that is the homeowner's responsibility (something not covered by the HOA), the property managers are available to perform maintenance as long as we pay them. So, we have people who are on-call and on-site to help with any problems that may arise, whether the problem is covered by the HOA or not.
5) Finding new tenants is the hardest part of the job, and that's not even all that difficult. We've found our tenants on craigslist, which is free. You can do credit and background checks online (we use e-renter.com) for a minimal fee. Most property managers in our area charge one month's rent as a tenant placement fee, and it just doesn't seem worth it to us.
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