The difference between us and them
If you want to invest in a piece of property and you're a hands on investor, then you're going to go find a real estate broker and you're going to work with the broker and the broker is going to find you a property and he's going to make projections as to what you might be able to afford, etc. Once the deal closes, he goes away. That deal is done. If you want to manage it yourself, then you better have some experience. If you don't, then you hire a manager. Well, how does your manager get paid? Your broker's already gone. He found you the piece of property, he told you it's a good investment, and you pay him either way.
Now you hire a manger and the manager gets paid, two ways. He gets paid by the rentals, which is generally the first month's rent, AND he gets paid a percent, which is generally around 10 percent of whatever he collects. He may or may not make your mortgage payments. He may or may not do anything other than collect the rent, take his money out, and send you the difference. Generally, property management software tracks information in about 20 different categories ... Repairs in maintenance paint, repairs in maintenance trash removal, mortgage payment gross (doesn't break it down, doesn't amortize the loan), etc. and that's what you get. You get a statement that says I collected the rent, I paid your mortgage, and I paid this out and here's your check. Then you hire your own your own accountant. Your accountant does your tax return. If it's individual, you just register individual, and he does your Schedule C.
That's it. You pay him, you pay your property manager, you pay your rental fees, you pay the broker to find the piece of property. When you go to sell it, you're going to pay the broker to sell the property, assuming you're not mad at him for getting you into the deal in the first place. You may pay somebody else. Realty Investments says we're going to do it all. We don't want you in debt. We've been doing this for almost 50 years. We know how to depreciate things. We don't use just the tax assessment ratio to determine what the value of a building is. We know, after all these years, we've never triggered an audit on any one of our clients, ever. We tread strictly by the letter of the law. This is the way it works.
We maximize your benefits. We don't want the tenant to move out. Vacancy, paint, fix up, and re-rental fee is a whole lot less then giving the tenant a little bit of a break after they've been there for a year. We have tenants who have been with us for 20 years or more. 45 years we've had one eviction! We loaned them the money to move back in again and they stayed 12 more years. We're responsible for the investment from beginning to end. There are no scapegoats. I can't blame the broker that you bought something that you paid too much for or you can't rent it for what he said you could rent it for. The broker can't blame me because I didn't do a good job on the house that he sold you. We'll do the taxes, we'll stand by what we projected. We track information on your property a 110 categories deep 10 columns wide. We compute yield. If you want to know what you've made on this piece of property since the day you bought it after taxes, we can tell you. We track all of that.
Our goal, unlike the other, is to get you back after you've gone through a complete cycle of real estate ownership. You're happy, you come back and you buy two. You bring your friends. That's the difference between us and everybody else. We don't take an ownership percentage off the top merely for being here. We're not a general partner. We might buy in with you under the same terms and conditions that you own, but we're not a piece of stock where just all of a sudden we take the top part and you get what's leftover.
That's what we do.