2011 Rental Property Summary

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while you know I like stats.  I thought I would compile some stats for what 2011 looked like as landlords for us.

New Purchases

• 26 new rental properties
• 22 are single family houses
• 2 are duplexes
• 1 two houses on a lot
• 1 commercial building
• The most affordable purchase was 40,000 and is rented for $800
• The most expensive purchase was 110,000

Property Management Stats

• 16 tenants still remain from 2009 and 2010
• 35 lease ups
• 8 tenants moved out in 2011
• 5 properties are under repairs or for rent (all new purchases)
• Average time to fill a vacancy took 18 days, longest 32 days, shortest 1 day
• No evictions, but two moved out without getting their deposit back
• Average repairs on move-out $700.  Some we paid, some tenants paid, some split, depending on circumstances
• One $100/per month rent decrease to keep a good tenant
• One $50/per month rent increase for a tenant with rent too low

Landlord Goals for 2012

• December 2012 gross rent collected to be $83,334 or more
• Add 20+ new properties
• Buy 1+ apartment or commercial building
• Convert all tenants to pay online ACH, deposit at the bank directly or pay by mail

Summary

We are very satisfied with how 2012 turned out from a landlord perspective.  It is still my business partner and myself that manage all these properties, if 2012 stays on track we are planning to hire an assistant and one of their primary responsibilities will be property management and lease ups.  Most of the work comes from the new lease ups and phone calls of the properties advertised for rent, if we stopped growing our portfolio more aggressively it would be easily manageable by one person at 10-20 hrs per week.

Why We Haven’t Raised the Rents

We have thought a lot about if it is time to start raising the rents and for 2011 we made the decision that when we are adding 20+ properties a year we don’t want to create more work for ourselves by pushing paying tenants out by increasing the rent.  I doubt many would leave, but even if we lose a couple, it is not worth it.  We had one property that took a while to rent, so we ended up way under market.  So we sent her a rental increase notice for 1/1/2012 which she just paid, but I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of rental increase notices from us in 2012 either.

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