Just a Landlord

Every year we spend about three weeks in the southwest. Typically it starts with four days at a database developer conference, this year and last were in Vegas. While I was honing my computer skills, my wife offered some classes and coaching for her Vegas area students of the Event Decorating Academy. We then rented a car and headed to Los Angeles to reconnect with vendors that supply the Event Decor Mart.

Carmen put on a couple of more classes and coaching sessions while in LA.  The trip ends in Vegas for the ASD trade show.  In general, I do not like Vegas. It is expensive, and we are not gamblers or night people. Although one night I did stay up to 11 PM;-) It is also triple digit hot every day.

I always return with a lot of new database techniques and skills.  More importantly to this conversation, I am a constant student of the housing industry, taking every opportunity to learn something while away from home.

First takeaway from this year’s trip: Short Term Rentals

We rented furnished apartments in both Vegas and LA through Hotels.com. These are units that the property management has set aside just for this purpose. If you have mid to upscale rentals, this might be an opportunity to increase your occupancy. It appears the going rate per week is around the half the monthly rent, plus a $100-150 fee per rental for cleaning.

Renting an apartment for extended work trips is a heck of a bargain for the consumer. The cost is half that of renting a hotel room in the same area. Plus you get a full kitchen to make your meals, which is important given Carmen’s extreme food allergies, and a washer as you are not going to make it three weeks without doing laundry.

In LA we stayed in a one bedroom at the Apex, just a block or so from the Staple Center. The Apex is a modern glass high-rise with a good sized living room, which Carmen needed for her coaching sessions.  In Vegas, we found a place half a block from the Convention Center – two bedroom, two baths, kitchen and laundry with a large living room for far less than the cost of a Vegas hotel.

From an owner’s perspective,  weekly furnished business rentals could help owners of mid to upper-end apartments in high demand areas increase their collected rent. I’m sure AirBnB also fits in here.

Municipalities often oppose things like weekly rentals and AirBnB because they cut into the hotel tax revenue. So if you are going to give this a go I would check local ordinances as well as with your city’s taxing authority to make sure you stay on this side of the law.

I wrote about unit fever a while ago. Recently I was speaking to a buddy and the subject came up. It is worth sharing again.

It is very easy to become a millionaire by investing in real estate…. simply start with five million.  Want to fast track your path to being a millionaire?  Start with only two million in the bank.

The above joke was originally about farmers, but our life and theirs are far too similar.  Both groups provide for fundamental needs, are hard businesses with high failure rates, both businesses rely too much on external factors and are both not well respected by society.  Another buddy of mine calls landlords “dirt farmers” and once told me that I should get into the day trading style of real estate.

You lose money in rental real estate by: paying too much for properties, buying at city assessed value for example; failing to consider all the costs associated with running the property, such as city sewer and water fees as well as the costs of compliance with all the rules that affect our industry; borrowing too much; and believing the broker’s or seller estimates of costs and vacancy rates…

The second greatest cause of owner failure is “unit fever” This is where one is fixated on ‘getting to 50 units’ or ‘owning a million dollars worth of real estate’ instead of focusing on the fundamentals of profitability. If your 50 units lose 5,000 a month or that million dollar commercial Class A office is 50% vacant, your checking account will be 100% vacant before long.

There is no “fun” in “fundamentals” no matter how you spell it. Fail at the fundamentals and fail financially.

Your success lies in knowing the true costs of running rental housing and accurate collection and vacancy losses that should be anticipated for the type and location of your rentals. Armed with this you must only buy properties that meet your performance targets within the confines of the economic realities of the market as opposed to some performa a seller provides you.

I remember back in 2005 or 06 when some kid (anyone 20 years younger than me) came to my office, telling me I was doing it wrong and offering to sell me an Excel sheet he had created to show the profit potential of well  leveraged near Southside housing.  Looking at his demo, I jokingly said ‘By the end of the decade Bill Gates will have to borrow money from you.” to which he replied enthusiastically, ‘Maybe not that rich, but very rich.’

Two years later he and his Excel buddies would be broke, their properties foreclosed and abandoned.  But I guess you can’t blame him entirely, some pretty smart people have done major worldwide economic damage with an Excel error.

The truth is the math is so simple all you need is a pencil and paper, okay a calculator may speed it up a bit, but not much.

How do you find accurate answers to costs and vacancy questions? The seller and their broker are probably the worst places to start looking for answers as they are both motivated to make it sound as good as it gets.

In the beginning, you should attend every local, in-person meeting of rental owners in your area. Get there early and talk to every old timer who will give you the time of day. Some will be curmudgeons, beat down by the realities of a hard business. But if you listen closely even they will help on your journey to enlightenment. Just don’t let the negativity wear off on you.

A side benefit from mingling with long-time owners is you may even meet one at the end of their career which offers you a good deal on some properties they are tired of, but of course do the math before committing. I met some people I ultimately bought properties from while networking at meetings. Seek out unusual opportunities as well. I met a group of Southside landlords that met for lunch every day. I bought properties from some of them, got maintenance connections from others and learned so much from all. Today’s new owner has a tool that we did not – Meetup.com. Go check it out.

A regret I have is that I was in the business over ten years before I joined the Apartment Association. I owe whatever success I’ve had to being an active member of the Association. Keyword “active.”

The other important tool for knowing your market is to limit your market. With few exceptions, the properties we own are within a 35 block by 35 block area, with the majority in a 15 block by 15 block subset of that area. I know these neighborhoods better than most people. That is a strategic advantage in both running the properties and buying wisely.

To be successful at landlording you must approach it as a business.  No better way to be innovative than to liberally steal ideas,  grabbing the best from other industries and repurposing them for ours.  I also have been thinking a lot about starting an incubator for physical businesses in Milwaukee that employee people that have a hard time finding good jobs.

Good artists copy, great artists steal. — Pablo Picasso

This past Saturday John Lee Dumas, who does the podcast “Entrepreneur on Fire” was speaking at the inaugural  Young Entrepreneur Convention in Des Moines.  If you have heard his podcast you know how great they are.  If you haven’t, go take a listen.  His format is doing an interview a day with a different entrepreneur, seven days a week.  He is an ex-tank commander in the Middle Eastern wars, turned successful podcaster and author.

I find such valuable insights in his stuff that I decided to go to Iowa to see him in person. I did not even look at who the other speakers were. After hearing him speak, if the Young Entrepreneur Convention been JLD alone, the trip would have been worth it.

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of every one of the presenters.

Kevin Harrington and Carmen Ballering at the Young Entrepreneur Convention

Probably the best known was Kevin Harrington, one of the original Sharks from Shark Tank.

His interesting story:  He got his start after seeing a knife pitchman at a county fair and noticing that the Discovery Channel was dark six hours a day in the early days of cable. This was the beginning of “As Seen On TV” and the entire infomercial craze.

Carmen spoke to Kevin Harrington off stage about doing a promo for the Event Decorating Academy. I think what he offered is a valid idea to try.

The other surprising presenter was Jeff Hoffman,  founder of PriceLine.com, the company that brought low-cost easy travel to the masses as well as the creator of the airport ticketing kiosk. There was some irony in seeing him Saturday and then having a terrible experience with American Airlines on the way home the next day.  His interesting story: He got kicked out of Yale for not having the complete tuition.  He solved it by creating a B2B software company even though he could not program himself at the time.

Jeff Hoffman, founder of Priceline, with Carmen Ballering

Two big take aways from Jeff Hoffman:  Create BIG goals, envision that you have achieved them and then work backward each step until you are where you are today.  That is how he arrived at doing concerts with Elton John, Britney Spears, and NSYNC.  He also has produced a profitable indie movie.

The other, which is a to our businesses, is to look at what is occurring outside of your industry and see what opportunities presents themselves.  PriceLine.com was based on his reading articles on perishable goods, distressed inventory, and spot pricing.

As I wrote earlier, every presenter was great.

The guy that put the event together was Brandon T Adams.  He had created the (3rd?) largest Kickstarter campaigns and is a 2012 Iowa State University grad.

Two of the presenters are from Madison.  Megan Watt ,who just released her first book, is a leadership trainer at her company, Dream Catalyst Labs. I paged through the book after hearing her presentation and bought it. The other is Jenna Atkinson, who gave a great presentation on marketing and social media.

Center, Ken Shamrock, “The most dangerous man in the world”, Carmen Ballering, who may just be the most dangerous woman in the world, and Tim Ballering

Cactus Jack Barringer is a very entertaining marketer. Guy holds a dozen patents.

There were a bunch other presenters during break out sessions that I did not get to see.  You can see the  YEC 2016 speaker list here.

One that we did see that I did not see a tie into our businesses but was cool to meet as our son-in-law and his brother are both MMA fighters, in fact, Monday of last week the brother, Kevin Vazquez, had his first major UFC fight was Ken Shamrock  “The World’s Most Dangerous Man”.  Shamrock and his partner were pitching a project to team retiring celebrities with young entrepreneurs.

The event was so great I can’t wait for next year’s conference.

#YECDM

As many of you know I like data.  Okay – maybe “like” is a little weak.  Perhaps its love, or at least a dangerous obsession.

Our industry, at least in regard to small properties,  shies away from meaningful data collection and utilization.  However, you can do so much with the right data – from setting your rents in the sweets spot between charging too little and losing money to charging too much, having your units remain vacant and … losing money.  What is that house you are looking buying at really worth and how much rent can you really expect to receive? In many neighborhoods paying assessed value is paying two to three times what everybody else is paying.  In a few high valued neighborhoods assessed value is a steal.  Ask the listing broker how much rent you can expect and some will tell you the sky.

Lately we’ve been looking at a lot of data points from rents, to evictions, to city orders, to special assessments, to tax assessments in general, to foreclosures and a ton of other interesting things.

For example we are developing an internal tool for suggesting rents that is using for rent ad data, including rent amount as well as other thing such as how long the ad has appeared, how many times in the past two years has the unit been for rent and mashes that up with property data – age, size, assessed value, date of last sale, how many units are owned by that owner and a dozen other metrics. Then combine this data with city order data, eviction data, tax delinquency and foreclosure information for the subject property.  While we haven’t finalized the algorithm, we are getting close.

Another fun project is trying to identify properties that will fail.  We look at when they were purchased, if they are tax delinquent, if they are on the DNS monthly reinspection list, if there are evictions, if the water bills have been placed on the tax roll, etc.

We started doing this with database tools, Python scripts and a lot of manual acquisition.  We’ve found a lot better methods since.

One of the tools we use for data acquisition is import.io. Today I was in San Francisco for their Extract conference.  The theme was “Data Stories Worth Sharing”  There were 600 in attendance, with what appeared to be an equal distribution of data scientists, data analysts, and application developers. Oh and there was one landlord.

I wanted to attend the last two but either the timing was bad or the event was in London, which is quite a trip for a one day conference.  Today was so great I regret not attending the previous events.

If people thought I was a pain in the butt before with my data obsession, I’ll be downright dangerous now. 😉

If you want to play with the tools I play with, another one to look at is Mirador, a data visualization tool developed by Harvard and others primarily for things like Ebla research.  This is a radically cool tool  for seeing patterns in data.  Before that we were only testing patterns against assumptions.  Mirador points out the patterns for you.  

To visualize the results there is Tableau or for the more adventuresome there is a Javascript library D3

I think I should call this “Big data about small properties.”

If you are interested in data and rental hosung and want to talk about this more, drop me an email at Tim@ApartmentsMilwaukee.com

I recently read a book “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results” by Gary Keller.  The author is a real estate professional, but the book is not about real estate per se.  The entire premises of the book is:

What’s the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

While simple, it is a great question.  Perhaps making an entire book out of it is a small stretch, but none the less a great question.

So let’s apply it to our industry.  What is the one thing that would change everything for us?

A few ideas that come to mind:

• Enforceable tenant responsibility
• A cooperative rather than confrontational relationship with local governments
• Superior screening tools
• Access to labor
• Reduced cost supplies
• Software
• Financing

What is your ONE thing that would change everything – lets decided and then decide to make it happen,  Post your ideas in the comments or over at the ApartmentAssoc Yahoo Group

Years ago I had a secret weapon … Jott an iPhone app that allowed you to speak a note and have a fairly well typed email. Unfortunately Jott was shut down a couple of years ago.

A year ago I stumbled on an excellent replacement, DO note. This app is available for both iPhones and Android.  It is free as well.

While you are out in the field you can quickly take a note of something you will likely have forgotten about by the time you get to a proper place to jot down your notes.

Milwaukee’s wave of violent crime has not subsided.

Yesterday (8-14-15) a unit prep crew for one of the other larger Southside owners were robbed at gun point while unloading their van at 8:30 AM.  The crime happened on 24th and Maple.

One work suffered serious injuries from being struck with an iron bar across the face. The guy has a broken lower jaw, upper jaw, nose and eye socket.

What did the thieves get from this violent attack?  $40.  They did not even steal any tools.  What was the most the criminals could have expected to get robbing a couple of apartment painters art work?  Maybe… $40.  WTF.  Who robs paint crews at 8:30 in the morning?

Two guys in a grey Hyundai were driving slowly down the street, as though they were looking for an address.  They pulled in and parked a couple of car lengths ahead of the worker’s van.  Two workers were unloading the stuff they needed to finish the prep.

One of the bad guys calmly walked up to a worker and asked him for a light for his cigarette.  The worker gets out his lighter, looks up and sees the gun.  Fixated on the gun, as you would be, he doesn’t see the other guy until he was struck in the face with the iron bar. Had the worker turned his head he could have been hit across the back of the neck.

The worker never had a chance to simply hand over his wallet. These criminals were willing to possibly kill someone for a couple of dollars.

How do you even protect yourself in a situation like this?   Even if the worker had a carry permit, there would have been no time to react between this being a stranger looking for a light and a violent attack.

Later that same day two people were shot in a robbery on 34th and Lincoln. A few days earlier and a few blocks east, a ten year old was shot in his own home as bad guys decided to shoot out in the street outside.  Things are seriously headed in the wrong direction.

I used to walk the neighborhood that are properties are located in every chance I got.  Today walking what use to be the fairly safe Southside, would be insane. We are close to eclipsing Detroit as the most depressed city in America.

Remember  Your handyman – cheap contractor or $60,000 mistake?

Many of you attended the Apartment Association’s Meeting earlier this month featuring employment law attorney John Murray.

Here is a link to the State of Wisconsin’s guidance on the issue.  Most owners I’ve met that call their workers contractors fail on four or more of the test outlined in the guide.  Failing only one of the nine tests will cost you substantially.  This is why we use employees exclusively, except for licensed trades like electricians.

Under section 102.07(8)1 of the Wisconsin Statutes, a person is required to meet a nine-part test before he or she is considered an independent contractor rather than an employee. A person is not an independent contractor for worker’s compensation purposes just because the person says they are, or because the contractor over them says so, or because they both say so, or even if other regulators (including the federal government and other state agencies) say so. The nine-part statutory test set forth under s. 102.07(8) of the Act, must be met before a person working under another person is considered not to be an employee. To be considered an independent contractor and not an employee, an individual must meet and maintain all nine of the following requirements:

1. Maintain a separate business.

2. Obtain a Federal Employer Identification number from the Federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or have filed business or self-employment income tax returns with the IRS based on the work or service in the previous year. (See note below.)

3. Operate under specific contracts.

4. Be responsible for operating expenses under the contracts.

5. Be responsible for satisfactory performance of the work under the contracts.

6. Be paid per contract, per job, by commission or by competitive bid.

7. Be subject to profit or loss in performing the work under the contracts.

8. Have recurring business liabilities and obligations.

9. Be in a position to succeed or fail if business expense exceeds income.

Note: When requesting a Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) from the IRS, you must inform the IRS that you are required by Wisconsin Worker’s Compensation law to obtain a FEIN. A social security number cannot be substituted for a FEIN and does not meet the legal burden of s. 102.07(8).

In the past few months I have had nearly a dozen of conversations with other rental property owners that have turned to some variation on the question ‘What do you attribute your success to’ My story is simply not that interesting.

It is a story of working hard at generally boring things. Yes, I have lived well off landlording for three decades. Yes, I now have time to walk  thirty-five to fifty miles a week, often barefoot on wet sand. Yes, I have the time to travel around the country to help my wife with her business.  I still work remotely when I am away form the office, just not the insane hours I did as a kid.

But the truth is mine is just not an exciting story.  Seems most people want to know how to be independent and wealthy by July.  They do not want to hear about the multi year, multi decade journey it took me.

I used to say ‘Everyone says they want to be me, but none of them are willing to do what it takes.’ That was too egotistical sounding and I only used it in private conversations with folks who pushed me to tell them “the secret.”

A couple of years ago I read a quote by Hugh MacLoed which I like better.  In fact I liked it so much I bought a numbered MacLoed print for my office wall.  At least it was there before my staff redecorated the offices … I haven’t checked in a while.

“What people say they want and what they’re willing to work their ass off to get are two different things. ” – Hugh MacLeod

I simply focused on one thing most of my life,  pursued boring fundamentals with dogged persistence and took the time to learn the laws that affect my business.  For me this worked well.

Focus. Today the buzzword in business start ups is ‘pivot’ and the mantra is ‘pivot early and pivot often’, meaning a complete change in direction when things get tough.  Tough seems to mean in their terms that you aren’t ready for a one hundred million  dollar IPO and it’s already been six months so it must be time to do something else. I wonder how many of these young entrepreneurs  give up just before success.

As I criticize the pivot I must admit I too had a major pivot in the very early days. When I was in my early twenties I wanted to own a state of the art contract computerized manufacturing (CNC/CAD) company.  My background was in manufacturing and CNC machining. I loved the challenges and logic of making things.  I started buying rentals with the goal of using them to finance the machine shop.  That dream hit a bump in the road.  My potential business partner had some legal problems that I was unaware of until we went for financing.  I stayed with the rentals and grew that business.  So on some level this was a pivot, but not in the sense it is used today.

Instead of the pivot I went for incremental improvement.  For thirty years I did little else for income that did not involve rental housing. Every day I try to do this better than we did yesterday.

It was only in the last few years that I diversified a bit from Milwaukee rentals by helping my wife with her business and began exploring Southeastern Florida real estate as well as some angel funding stuff. You will not create the next PayPal, eBay or Google through incremental improvement, but it is a path to a decent sustainable lifestyle.  I see it as a fault of mine that my dreams were not larger, but I am fairly content where I’m at.

Persistence is still being there when everyone else gets tired and goes home.  Persistence is when you still show up and giving it your all even though you’ve had  three bad months in a row. Persistence is eating Kraft instant macaroni four times a week for months on end to finance a rehab. Persistence is leaving for work at 6 AM and not arriving home until 10 PM every day for weeks on end.  (See my follow up post on ten things I should have done differently) Persistence is staying the course when everyone around you says it is a no win game.

Despite how it is spelled, there is no fun in the fundamentals. Once the adrenaline rush of buying a building wears off so does the enthusiasm of many.  Rental real estate is a tough business.  When my son said he wanted to follow me into the business I told him to find something better to do with his life.  And landlording is a business, not an investment, at least not at the levels we are dealing with.

Bookkeeping, taxes, employees/HR, purchasing, collections, filling vacancies, evictions, customer service and dealing with bureaucrats are all part of the unfun fundamentals.

To succeed at landlording you have to focus on these fundamentals and pay attention to a myriad of laws and rules that affect us. I’m pretty sure that must every business out there is similar in this regard.

I’ve done all of those, others who are successful today have shared similar stories.  Then there are those who seemed to hold such promise at the beginning but suddenly were washed out.  Most of them looked for a shortcut, ignoring the fundamentals and then gave up when it got a wee bit hard.

Let’s assume the “broken windows” theory is correct.  It makes sense – order begets order, chaos and disarray breeds more chaos.  It makes sense logically, whether or not you can quantify the results I’ll leave to those much smarter than I.

However,  Milwaukee attempts to repurpose the theory as an argument for greater rental housing code enforcement and nuisance enforcement aimed primarily at rental housing.  In doing so our city has undermined the true message, which is: For the broken windows theory to produce results an entire neighborhood must be held to a standard.  The researchers use “neighborhood order” to describe the goal.

The article is primarily about police and neighbor intervention into petty crime creates order that reduces other petty crime and larger problems.  The words landlord, rent, code enforcement, building inspection do not appear anywhere in the article. Yet, to hear Milwaukee officials speak of the broken window theory, they frame it as a landlord’s responsibly.

A walk down 5th Place, the original target for the expansion of the RIP (rental inspection program), will show a far greater number of owner occupied housing in serious disrepair* than rental houses.  Milwaukee senior assessor Mary Hennen stated under oath a couple of years ago similarly that owner occupied housing in these neighborhoods are often in worse condition than rentals.

As an apparent precursor to the RIP proposal , on September 3rd and 4th,2014 DNS sent a squadron of five inspectors down Fifth Place for a block sweep.  Although the inspectors were able to see and write up some fairly minor problems on rental homes, amazingly when it came to the owner occupied houses on this street these five inspectors missed a dozen failed roofs, half a dozen failed porches, a couple of chimneys that looked about to fall and one house that is failing structurally.  Sixteen owner occupied properties in total that were as bad or worse than the seventeen rentals on the street that received orders. They also missed the two abandoned structures that should have been sent to raze, properties with actual broken windows.  My first two trips down the block had city lots strewn with trash.  I’ll guess that they were afraid someone would point that out in a RIP hearing.  They were clean on my third and forth trip.

Of the two properties that I saw blatant drug dealing coming from on three of my trips down the block this fall, one was owner occupied and the other owned by a guy who lives in the district on 15th and Cleveland. Far from the stereotypical absentee landlord.

If the RIP as well as other code initiatives are truly about stabilizing the neighborhoods, then plans must be in place to address the owner occupied and city owned properties that also drag down the neighborhood.

Tim Ballering

Tim@ApartmentsMilwaukee.com

*I consider serious disrepair as failed roofs, dangerous porches, crumbling chimneys and structural failure.

On Nov 30, 2014, on the ApartmentAssoc Yahoo Group  Bill Lauer wrote:

The previous article entitled “Broken Windows” really isn’t about broken windows.  It is about a theory that first showed up in the early 1980s [Link] and influences many of today’s social policies that impact our businesses every day.  Researchers in New York parked a car with no license plates on it, on a busy street. In a very short period of time, everything of value was stripped from it. Likewise, if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. They concluded that somehow the disrepair brought more disrepair.  Likewise, if crimes like jaywalking and panhandling are allowed, then more felonious crimes will follow.

The recent public hearings on the expansion of the Rental Inspection Program indicate several inner-city alders believe that because certain neighborhoods are run down, that crime is attracted to those neighborhoods.  But if memory serves me correctly, these same neighborhoods had huge crime problems before the neighborhoods were runned down.  Could it be that something else attracted the criminal element? Could it be true that because criminals do not maintain property very well that over time, neighborhoods end up in disrepair? They see the disrepair as the fault of greedy landlords, instead of seeing the landlords as the victims of the criminals.

One Alder literally said that the RIP was a tool to break up these “hot spots” of criminal activity. This strategy scatters criminal activity into surrounding neighborhoods rather than deal with the problem where it is. The mayor’s budget hires more building inspectors and reduces the number of armed police, which is contrary to the original research which says that police presence was needed to make positive change.

For the last 20 years, as “hot spots” break up and houses get bulldozed, and criminals need housing, they move into unsuspecting neighborhoods. That is why we are seeing crime increase (again) in Bay View, West Allis, Sherman Park, St, Joe’s area, just to name a few. The strategy employed in the RIP has not worked. But a new generation of politicians refuse to learn the lessons of the past and want to try this stuff again with a new name. They continue to make the buildings the problem rather than the people who live there.

The article is a long read but makes very interesting points that are useful in our discussions with our politicians.  It gives some insight into the crazy policies that are coming from city hall. But most importantly it points to the need for landlords to organize and become vocal about our experience working in Milwaukee.

 Bill Lauer