Author: Tim Ballering

Categories
Financing Strategy

A different way of looking at mortgages

Decades ago one of the people I considered a mentor told me: Pay $100 a month extra principal on the property with lowest mortgage balance.

When that property pays off, pay the mortgage amount plus the $100 towards the property with the next lowest balance and so on.

I argued that the money should be put towards the loan with the highest interest.

He said ‘Cash flow is king. Without cash flow, the rate of interest doesn’t matter, you’ll go broke.’

Ten years later I thanked him. He said ‘I wished I would have followed my own advice.’

Categories
Government Behaving Badly Investing Leases & Rental Agreements Rent Control

National Rent Control?

There is talk of national rent control, with maximum rent increases of 3%, as well as only just cause evictions..

If your rents are below market, they could remain so forever. When it comes time to sell and you are getting $600 a month and the neighbor $800, the value of your property will be gravely diminished.

This punishes owners who allow long term tenants to remain below market. Eventually this will punish those tenants as well.

In some markets perhaps owners are evicting to gentrify, but in our market when an owner uses a 28 day no cause notice it generally means there is a behavioral problem. This will result in bad tenants staying and annoying their neighbors longer as well as more contentious relationships between owners and people that are problematic.

https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/multifamily/whats-in-aocs-national-rent-control-proposal-101041

“The economists are right, and the populists are wrong,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial. “Rent-control laws can be good for some privileged beneficiaries, who are often not the people who really need help. But they are bad for many others.”

Specifically, the Place to Prosper Act calls for a cap of 3% or the annual U.S.. Consumer Price Index increase, whichever is greater, for rents in housing markets nationwide.

Categories
Fair Housing Government Behaving Badly Housing policies Magner v. Gallagher

HUD’s charges California city with discrimination over code enforcement ordinance


https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/19/ben-carson-hesperia-california-discrimination-charge-051504

The ordinance also mandated unannounced annual inspections and criminal-background screenings by the sheriff’s department. The county sheriff’s department enforced the ordinance in a way that targeted minorities and evicted some residents who were the victims of crimes, including people who had called the police, HUD alleges.


HT: Tristan Pettit

This is similar to, Magner v. Gallagher a case that went to the SCOTUS. St Paul withdrew under political pressure from the Obama Administration.

Five years ago almost to the day, I shared the comments of Attorney John Shoemaker who represented the property owners in Magner. You can read that here:

Attorney Shoemaker on HUD Funding, Code Enforcement and Fair Housing
Categories
Apartment Association Our industry Software

What I’ve Learned About moving a YahooGroup

YahooGroups is shutting down.   There will be limited email access allowed after 10/28/2019.  It appears on 12/14/19 everything gets deleted.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/16/yahoo-groups-to-shut-down/

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/16/yahoo-groups-shutting-down/

I run the ApartmentAssoc@YahooGroups and WiRentalCoalition as well as a group for our board of directors AASEWAdvisors.

Our lists are valuable enough that I did not want to let them die.  I wanted to share with you my findings as I feel the same about your list.

Replacement choices are Google Groups,  a FaceBook Group or Groups.io.  Smart people recommended the latter.  My subscribers all hated the FB idea. After much reading and research, Groups.io was my choice as well. 

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-save-and-migrate-your-yahoo-groups-data-before-i-1839172243

Group.io costs $110 for an annual premium subscription.  You need the premium annual subscription to import your Yahoo archives. Attachments are not imported. If you just want to manually import users you can do a one month premium for $10.  

Info on Group.io import (no attachments):
https://groups.io/static/transfer

To download the full data via Yahoo – At least that is the thought.  I started this two days ago and am still waiting they say it can take a month.

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/download-data-privacy-dashboard-sln28671.html

Third party tools:
http://www.personalgroupware.com  (I use a Mac, so this is unavailable for me to try, but highly recommended)

http://yahoogroupedia.pbworks.com/w/page/93006447/Chrome%20Application%20To%20Download%20Messages A Chrome Extension, but the result file is not 100% what I expected.  No attachments

https://www.jefftk.com/p/archiving-yahoo-groups a Python script

A lot of work, but the ApartmentAssoc list has been a passion of mine since it was 20 people on AOL in 1995.

Tim Ballering
Tim@ApartmentsMilwaukee.com

UPDATE: The Python script produces much better results than the Chrome extension once you get the dependencies correct. The output is one JSON file per email. These can fairly easily be parsed into any format you need.

Categories
Apartment Association

ApartmentAssoc email list has moved

Due to the impending shut down of YahooGroups we have moved to Groups.io.  Groups.io is highly rated by others and in my experimenting seems  much better than Yahoo in many aspects. 

I invite you come along with us to our new home so that you can continue to get the benefit of the knowledge shared here.

Groups.io Email Addresses

Update 11/4/2019:

All prior YahooGroups messages have been successfully transferred to our new Groups.io account.  You can now search old messages that were originally posted to this list when it was on YahooGroups or even eGroups.  

There is a treasure trove of landlording information here, going back to the year 2000.  Spend the time reading these post and you’ll have an MBA in rental real estate. 😉

Tim Ballering
Tim@ApartmentsMilwaukee.com

Categories
Government Behaving Badly Rent Control

Why you need to keep your rents at market

California rent control does a forced roll back of rents increased after the bill’s introduction.

This penalizes landlords who left long term tenants at below market rent and then raised to market at turn over, a common practice in our industry as well as a benefit to long term tenants.

From the National Law Review:

[California] AB1482 will apply to all rent increases occurring on or after March 15, 2019. In the event that an owner increased the rent by more than five percent (5%) plus the percentage change in the cost of living, between March 15, 2019, and January 1, 2020, the applicable rent on January 1, 2020, will be the rent as of March 15, 2019, plus the maximum permissible increase.

It is worth reading the full article

Categories
Tenant Screening

A couple of more screening resources

Here are two more:


National Sex Offender database
https://www.nsopw.gov/Search/Results 

WI Sex Offender
https://appsdoc.wi.gov/public/ 

Categories
Tenant Screening

Online Court Access – most states

We needed to check an out of state applicant. When searching for court records we found a great resource.

National Center For State Courts

Categories
Evicted - Matt Desmond Evictions

An Eviction Attorney Is A Right?

On top of the dire shortage of affordable rental homes, the rising number of evictions has only exacerbated tenants’ housing issues. In 2016, landlords in the United states filed an estimated 2.3 million evictions against tenants—an average of four evictions per minute.9 Nearly 900,000 of these filings resulted in an actual eviction,10 leading to more than 2.3 million people being displaced from their homes that year.11 Like the shortage of affordable homes, evictions also disproportionately harm marginalized communities. 

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2019/10/02/475263/right-counsel-right-fighting-chance/

The authors try to make the argument that evictions somehow add to the shortage of affordable housing and tenants having attorneys to help delay the eviction would help.

The much more unpleasant truth is in delaying evictions, and thereby causing more loses for the owner.

Only the tenant that is not paying benefits. Tenants that are meeting their obligations are actually suffering as owners have to raise all rents to compensate for the loses caused by the few tenants that don’t pay or are destructive.

Evictions add to housing shortages? Really? Obviously if there is a shortage of available units, evictions are making units available to someone else who also needed housing.

However, providing tenants with attorneys with the intent of delaying evictions based on legitimate causes actually may be adding to the overall rental housing shortage. How so?

Mom and Pop: I’ve seen many owner occupant duplex owners refuse to rent their upper unit after a bad experience in eviction court. Often these folks let tenants get away with excuses and promises to pay until the tenant owes thousands of dollars.

Large investors: You can invest in the Dow Jones Industrials and have seen an average 8% annual return 1957 to today, 10% since 1926. With index funds your work is checking your bank account. With rentals its so much more. Invest in the next FaceBook, Microsoft or the next big thing.

The point that is missed by many is we don’t have to be landlords and every time a landlord sells out, the next has to increase rents as they now have larger mortgages and less capitalization.

Categories
Apartment Association Opportunities

Landlording is a business. An often difficult business, but a business.

If they are being honest, every landlord will tell you they have had days of despair.

However, if you run it like a business you can do well.

If you don’t run it as a business; don’t enforce your rules; don’t know the laws; let problems affect you personally instead of approaching them logically; or don’t calculate for expected costs, you will fail.

The best way to find the path to success is to actively participate in local landlord groups.