Category Archives: Property Management

While you were enjoying turkey and football, Zillow.com was negotiating a $16 million all-cash deal for HotPads, a map-based rental and real estate site, announced November 26, 2012.   The move makes sense for Zillow ― HotPads generates 2.8 million uniques each month, mostly from renters.  That’s another 2.8 million potential leads for landlords participating in the Zillow Rental Network.  Zillow launched its rental marketplace in October, four months after acquiring RentJuice for $40 million.  Once HotPads is intergrated, the …

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During a recent CNBC interview, Warren Buffett confirmed what we’ve believed since 2008—single-family homes are a very attractive investment, if you’ve got the right property management system in place:   “And if I—literally, if I was an investor that was a handy type, which I’m not, and I could buy a couple of them at distressed prices and find renters, I think that’s—and again take a 30-year mortgage, it’s a leveraged way of owning a very cheap asset now and …

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Renters love PadMapper.com because it aggregates rental listings from across the web and displays them on one simple Google map.  The website also allows searchers to filter results based on a number of factors, including rent range, bedrooms and bathrooms, amenities, pets, and location.  As the filters are changed, the map of listings continuously updates.   In a nutshell, PadMapper eliminates the hassle of scrolling through page after page of unorganized Craigslist ads, and it’s a great way to compare rents across …

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It shouldn’t surprise, but it still does: In Michigan, foreclosures (in some form or another, including pre-foreclosures) and bank-owned properties accounted for a staggering 40% of all residential real estate sales in the quarter ending June 30, 2011.   In a report published by RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosures, the average foreclosure in Michigan sold for $70,765, a hefty 40% discount off the State average. Bank-owned buyers did even better, getting close to a 46% discount. And pre-foreclosure sales—sales …

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The average time for the foreclosure process—from the time of the first notice to the completed foreclosure—has ballooned to a staggering 400 days. Instead of keeping these bad bets on their books that long, however, the nation’s biggest banks are responding by encouraging delinquent and underwater borrowers to pursue short sales.   By definition, the lender loses money at a short sale, wherein the lender approves a sale by the borrower for less than the loan amount, with the lender—not …

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Zillow.com, the popular online real estate database, went public on Wednesday, pricing itself at $20 a share. After opening at a sky-high $60, a 200 percent jump, Zillow dropped to as low as $32.50 before treading in the $35-$40 range.   At its peak, Zillow.com was valued at $1.6 billion—not bad for a company barely turning a profit. Zillow’s $70 million float follows HomeAway.com’s, which raised $216 million in June.    

According to a report released today by real estate data analysis firm CoreLogic, 36% of Michigan homeowners with a second mortgage are underwater.  Michigan fares slightly better than the rest of the country, where 38% of second-mortgage borrowers are underwater.  Nevada, at 63%, has the highest rate of negative equity. Adding to their troubles, underwater homeowners seeking a short sale—selling a property for less than the value of the outstanding mortgages—have a much harder time doing so when they have a second mortgage, because all the …

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Michigan legislators have introduced a bill that would shorten the redemption period after a foreclosure sale from 6 months to 3 months.   Statutory redemption, in general, is the right of a defaulting mortgagor to regain ownership of property after a foreclosure sale by paying what the property fetched at the sale, with interest from the date of the sale at the interest rate provided for by the mortgage agreement, plus costs.   In Michigan, as it is currently written, homeowners in …

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Beginning in 2011 we committed to becoming a completely paperless property management company.  To that end, we converted our Microsoft Word lease, which we often printed and mailed or delivered to prospective tenants, into a fillable, editable PDF lease.  Click here to see our sample Michigan lease.*   Digitizing the leasing process speeds up sending, receiving, and executing lease documents.  PDF forms can be emailed as an attachment, eliminating the need to mail or fax.  PDFs can be posted on …

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We work with seasoned investors with a stable of properties, out-of-state homeowners with one house they can’t sell, and everyone in between. Yet it’s always the same:  property owners want their house ready-to-rent under budget and on time.   This picture is from a property located near Heritage Hill in Grand Rapids that an investor bought to rehabilitate and ultimately rent out as a single-family unit.  The previous tenants had destroyed the property, and the owner later lost it to …

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