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You are here: Home / Archives for landlord tip

Landlord Video Tips – How To Get Great Photos For Rental Ads

June 3, 2013 By Landlord Education

Photos of your rental propertyIn this video I have a handy tip to help you get great looking photos for use in your advertising.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and when it comes to making your rental property stand out, having a great picture in your ad can make all the difference. The problem is, how do you make an empty living room stand out?

That’s where today’s tip comes into play. In fairness, this won’t always work for you, and it won’t always work in all properties. It depends on your tenants, the properties condition and your tenants cooperation. Hopefully by now you’re looking forward to the video, so go take a look!

Oh and don’t forget, leave us some feedback, if you like the video, be sure to like it and share it with other landlords and if you have questions you’d like me to answer in a video, just leave it in the comment section below! Happy Landlording!

If you haven’t registered, how will you know when the next video is ready? If you’re not registered, scroll up to the top and fill in your name and email on the top right of the screen and I’ll update you when I have the next video up, plus you’ll get more articles, tips and ideas on how to be a more profitable and better educated landlord.

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Filed Under: Landlord Video Tips, Property Management, Tenants Tagged With: landlord tip, marketing rentals

Do You Really Understand Cashflow?

February 26, 2012 By Landlord Education

Determining Actual Rental Cashflow

rental cashflowT to succeed and really profit as a landlord, one of the basic areas you need to understand is the cashflow your property generates and how to then budget it for future expenses or issues.

Without planning ahead like this, rookie landlords often get caught in rough situations where there simply isn’t enough money to deal with a big problem.

Here’s how a new landlord typically sees it:

Basic Monthly Cashflow

Monthly Income
Rent Upper Unit: $1,100
Rent Lower Unit: $800
Total Rent: $1,900

Monthly Expenses
Mortgage: $1,200
Taxes: $175
Insurance: $50
Total Expenses: $1,425

Total Cashflow (Income – Expenses)
$475

This is pretty typical and the $475 then goes directly into the landlords hands as profit. However, this doesn’t help you long term. Especially if you plan to expand or avoid future expenses.

To avoid falling into a trap, I’d suggest you should change your projections a bit and make it look like this (of course use your own numbers!):

Monthly Expenses
Mortgage: $1,200
Taxes: $175
Insurance: $50
Vacancy Reserve (current vacancy rate % x 2, so 10% of monthly income) $190
Repair Reserve (approximately 5-7% of monthly income) $95 (I used 5%)
Revised Total Expenses: $1,710

Actual Cashflow: $190
But Why?

So you don’t end up like the US government and have to borrow money to pay your expenses! Lack of long term planning and understanding future costs and expenses is wreaking havocs on governments and individuals throughout the world. You can do better than that.

Plan Now For The Future of  Your Property

If you plan in advance and understand you will have vacancies and also understand you will need to do repairs and that you can create reserves so money doesn’t have to come out of your pocket later, you will learn to sleep much better at night. That’s what the second example shows.

The real trick is to take those reserves you are budgeting for and move them into a separate reserve account so you don’t accidentally spend them. Once you start thinking like this you will no longer feel like you are blindsided or trapped when vacancies or repairs start coming up and it will change how you look at your properties.

Remember, Properties are not short term ATM’s, but rather long term investments.

Advanced Landlord Tip

If you have steady tenants for an extended period, this reserve can build up, so we like to put a cap of around $5,000 on a property. Once the reserves break that dollar amount, it all becomes pure cash flow again like the first example. Or……

If you are buying a new rental property, we start with a $5,000 reserve fund that we use as our cushion. That provides us with the higher cash flow right from the start. Then if we do have vacancies or repairs, we draw money out of the reserve and then revert back to the lower cash flow amount until the reserve is topped up again.

Can you see how this takes the stress out of owning property? Once you start implementing a system like this and get used to it, the pressure of having to take the first available tenant just to fill the property evaporates. It affords you more time to choose the proper tenants and doesn’t affect you directly where it hurts, in your bank account!

Is this something you are already doing? If it is great I would love to hear how it’s working for you, if it’s not, when will you be starting?

Filed Under: Landlord Business, Property Management Tagged With: cash flow, income property cash flow, increasing cash flow, investing in rental properties, landlord advice, landlord business, landlord education, landlord tip, landlord tips, landlord training

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