In this video recap of http://www.CreatingWealthPodcast.com Show #102, learn about new technology for tracking your real estate investments on your iPhone and ways to screen your tenants to avoid evictions and unprofitable renters. https://www.jasonhartman.com.
Jason recently published his one hundred and second Creating Wealth show, and is still providing new and useful insights with each new installment. This week, Jason met with Joel to discuss the ‘property tracker’ software application moving to the iPhone, in addition to its current home on the Internet. The unique nature of the property tracker software is its specialization for small to medium investors. It allows users to quickly analyze the profitability of their potential deals, and keep track of their property portfolio in a user-friendly format. The big advantage that this software provides is that it helps investors to act more confidently when making deals; it helps to keep information organized for working with your property managers, and also keeps everything straight for taxes. Jason is a strong proponent of using technology to drive profitability opportunities, and the property tracker software helps to achieve this goal by enabling investors to make smart business decisions very quickly.
During this show, Jason also announced that he has scheduled an interview with the famous author of the ‘Rich Dad’ book series, Robert Kiyosaki. This marks another key milestone in Jason’s recent string of interviews with notable authors and thinkers. Over the last few months, Jason has greatly expanded the scope of his Creating Wealth show through interviews with market experts. This has given his listeners the benefit of hearing different viewpoints from a very wide variety of expertise. In the future, Jason has scheduled interviews with James West and Addisson Wiggin. Additionally, he is working to book interviews with Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Chuck Norris.
In the second half of the podcast, Jason talked with Jeff Cronrod from the American Apartment Owners Association (AAOA) board of directors. Jeff also has a lot of experience with tenant collections that he shared with Jason’s listeners. Current economics and demographics are shifting in favor of multi-family investing with the significant shift of homeowners to the rental pool, and the emergence of Generation Y as future renters. This will create tremendous opportunities for apartment owners and multi-family property investors.
However, when investing in multi-family properties, tenant screening is a critical piece of generating a favorable return. The reason for this is because bad tenants can be an extremely large liability if they have payment issues or damage the property. Taking extra effort up front can have a very significant effect over the long term by avoiding evictions, lost rent, and building repairs. Common tools for tenant screening are the employment history, tenant history, and criminal background reports. It is also very important for property managers to be a bit of a ‘detective’ and double-check for fake or borrowed social security numbers. Another common practice is to ask for the prior month’s rent receipt, bank statements, W-2 records, etc. The purpose of this analysis is to cross-check documents to ensure that the applicants are representing themselves accurately. While it is not possible to completely eliminate the possibility of accepting bad tenants, doing a little bit of legwork before accepting new applicants can prove to be extremely valuable down the road.