Magazine Articles

As we learn in economics classes, just about the worse form of price control is price fixing land rents (rent control). Property rights at first and then financial damage to the community are enormous. In the U.S.A., rent controls are relatively rare. Virtually all the history of rent controls is in Europe. Hundreds – even…

Ask any manager today, “Who is your favorite resident?”  He or she will probably tell you the one who drops the rent in the night deposit, is never late and never comes to the office to complain.  These residents are great – move them in and they leave you alone! Some of us will agree…

Marketing consists of many factors that heavily depend on the person who is interested in your property. Throughout my experience as an intern (and answering hundreds of calls a week), I have easily been able to identify the

Just when you thought your job as a landlord was difficult enough and even with due diligence in collecting proper proof of income from applicants, you could be getting scammed.  It’s a sad world today, with bad people thinking

From the first decision to invest in real estate to actually buying your first rental property, there is a lot of work to be done.  This task may be daunting for the first-time investor.  Owning property is a tough business and the field is peppered with

  Conduct  a smoke detector battery exchange twice  a year at all properties.  Keep  alog of the exchange with tenant’s acknowledgement. Perform routine maintenance and have

New York seems to have more than its fair share of knuckleheads. Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman are both stalwart columnists in The New York Times. And there’s staff writer James Surowiecki at the New Yorker magazine. More about that in a minute… [First] we return to wondering about money. Not that we care especially…

Many landlords have a “My way or the highway” attitude, and THAT attitude limits their income. We MUST be in tune with our residents’ thinking and life-needs so we can

Value means different things to different people. To a banker, loan value is determined by whether or not the building is likely to generate enough income to pay its expenses and meet debt coverage ratio (DCR) guidelines. It meets value or it doesn’t. An investor might have additional perspectives. While any mortgaged investment must first…

On April 9, 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance making it mandatory to seismically retrofit approximately 2,800 soft-story buildings, those defined as wood-frame residential structures with five or more units and three or more stories with weak first stories. There are roughly 4,300 such buildings. Owners are required to pay a…