If you are going to be renting it out and not be closeby to manage it yourself, get professional help. I am the property manager for my mom's rental properties and it is a lot of work. I screen tenants in person, run background/credit checks, deal with late/ no rent and fees, deal with aggressive tenants, have dealt with a suicide attempt, and I clean up the property when they move out (I have cleaned up a lot of literal shit). A professional property manager will find you quality renters, follow the letter of the law, and take care of problems are they arise. Getting rid of a bad renter is a real headache. Just in general, if this is going to be your only rental property and you won't be nearby, get help. If you were planning on making this more of a part-time thing and planned on owning a few to several properties, I'd say to read up on certain things, sign up for certain services, get a lawyer to look over your documents, etc. Decide on how much you want to be involved. If the answer is "not much," hire someone else. They will usually take a % of the monthly rental fee but they have standards and a checklist. They also typically have form contracts and agreements written up that are reasonable and already checked out by an attorney. Laws vary wildly state to state.
Thanks for the advice! Definitely a lot of common themes from people we've spoken with so far. We are going to be close by and this will be our only property, but we are absolutely looking into a management company to run things for us. We have friends that use one and are very happy with them, so we're going to reach out. We also have a real estate agent assisting in finding/vetting renters who's ok with us putting out our own listings as well.
Just a few horror stories to help with your decision... Around here, people are renting vacation rentals, $1200-$2000 a week properties, long enough to cook up a big batch of meth. These are actually managed properties, the people just do it with stolen information and disappear. Thousands of dirty diapers left behind in the corners of a home. A young girl flushing her soiled underwear down the toilet=massive clog=fecal matter on the bathroom floor and a huge plumbing bill. My own brother in-law welded up a homemade wood burning stove and hooked it to a bad chimney, burnt the house down. Good luck.
Do NOT rush the renting process. Vet the renters thoroughly and don't fall for sob stories. A good tenant is worth their weight in gold and a bad one can write off your property. Be selfish with who you choose.
This. I don't have rentals but I have a friend that does he says he will leave the house empty indefinitely rather then rent to the wrong person.
Thanks for the stories and advice, guys. Definitely appreciate it. And yeah, I'm absolutely going to spend the time to get a good renter and not go out penny wise, pound foolish just to get someone in there as quick as possible. I've got reserves for that very reason so I can weather some vacancy.
Anyone know where I can get a torrent of season 5 of Ripper Street? My only option seems to be to buy the damn thing for 20 bucks or wait until maybe October if they decide to release it on Netflix. There is no option to rent episodes and it doesn't come with Amazon Prime. They leave you hanging in season 4 really bad and I'm dying to see the end.
Ok, so jumping off of this post... I've heard about KODI but I don't know quite what it is or how it works. Can you explain a little what the deal with it is?
It's a media player that will stream files (audio, video, pics, etc). It was built for legitimate uses like you streaming media from your family media server. It allows for developers to create plugins. Some developers have created plugins that access the streams stored on those shady streaming sites. The main one is named Exodus. In the end it basically works like a free version of Netflix for any TV show or Movie ever made. Most of the popular stuff gets updated the day after it airs on TV. I altered an Amazon fire TV box to run KODI. There are a lot of pretty simple guides out there on how to do this. Just search for "fire stick kodi exodus" to find one. You can also do live sports with other plugins. And PPV stuff like UFC/WWE and Boxing. It's a very grey area of legality in the us. Safer than torrenting since you never actually download the files.
I feel like it would be worth its weight in gold if I could get free PPV for UFC alone. This is interesting.
Every movie, every TV show period. Including the ones you forgot. Like, every fucking episode of SNL. You can watch all 17 of the actual hilarious skits they made. Exodus is all that I use. New TV episodes happen 12-24 hours after they air on mine.
I have an Mxq Pro 4K android box run off our home wifi. It's the size of an 8-track tape and comes loaded with Kodi plus many apps for the price of an 8-bit Nintendo. Pro tip: have the best, strongest wifi possible or it will work dubiously. You need one for each TV you have, though. It all just doesn't feel right. And yet I don't care whatsoever. I have free TV.
You should have it hardwired. You aren't streaming 4K through it. But if you were it would probably need to be hardwired. I subscribe to PSVUE for 90% of what I watch. I only use Kodi for things not on that or Netflix. I prefer the content creators get paid. Sports Devil is what I use for streaming sports. It works very well for NFL. It's not fast enough for NHL. I haven't looked for baseball games since PSVUE covers that.
I am having trouble finding info on this at the DOL or GaDOL websites. And, I wasn't finding much through Google, either. I work for myself, and prior to that spent my professional career working for a firm with less than 25 employees (i.e. most rules don't apply), so I have no experience with this. But, a friend asked me, and I didn't know. She works part time for a large company, that has a local shop. The middle manager of her area quit a few months ago and hasn't been replaced. The branch manager is an idiot and unhelpful. All of the part-time folks have stepped up to fill the gaps left by the middle manager, and my friend is occasionally working more than 30 hours a week, but usually not. However, she's trying to sort through her pay that doesn't seem right, and heard from another employee that the company is not paying actual hours worked but some kind of average. Is that a thing?