How One Landlord Keeps His Rentals Low Maintenance in 2024

if you could create from scratch the perfect low-maintenance rental property what would it look like that's the question we're going to tackle in today's edition of the ask coach podcast and to help me answer that question I brought on none other than Matt The Lumberjack landlord who owns and self- manages 137 rental units and we're getting started right now welcome to the podcast real estate investing with Coach Carson I'm your host Chad Carson you can also call me coach Carson and this is a show to help you get out of the financial grind so you can spend your time doing more of what matters today's question was inspired by aan Cella a member of my private coaching Community rental property Mastery if you haven't heard of rental property Mastery this is the place where I help small and mighty investors to buy more deals raise more money and to turn their rental properties into passive income so they can actually Achieve Financial Freedom you can check it out or join at the link in the podcast or YouTube description below as you'll see this episode was recorded on site at the one rental at a time event in Las Vegas hosted by Michael Zuber a friend and fellow real estate YouTuber I want to thank Michael for allowing me to use his awesome recording studio and for allowing me to share this with you now let's get to the conversation you know and the other thing too is it's on a budget right because you know the guys can get in there and they can get nuts and then you're looking at you know well there's this special custom boiler that they only make seven of a year out of Italy and it's $47,000 but it has 95% afue which is its efficiency rating so what we look at is we really look at that repeatability right so we have a model where we have 137 units we want something that's repeatable and so if we were crafting something from scratch it's largely what we've already done in our existing units so we do a lot of go to the studs and we do buildings that are as old as 160 years old so there's a lot of challenges with that old of a building so what we're typically looking at so let's just start in the basement and kind of work up so in the basement we're we're going to have something that's going to be like a Combi boiler a Combi boiler is a boiler that does not only your heat but it also does your hot water we particularly like the IBC brand because it's built and designed and made in Canada they have pretty cold Winters there yeah so we have some cold Winters Northeast but again the key to it is not only its capacity to heat but it also has OnDemand hot water you never run out of hot water you never get the call when you have one of those high density units where you might have four five six people in it and they say yeah that's great but by the fourth person there's no hot water left so they're calling you constantly about yeah there's no hot water yeah you used it all I'll assume you have you also from a mechanical standpoint have one unit I have hot water heaters mainly y they're in the crawl space they're getting rusted out yep they're in a different place in the heating and air so I assume there's kind of an efficiency there of just you send one person in One service person in to fix the hot water heater or check it on it or whatever instead of having two separate units which is sounds small but that's that's can be a big thing it's huge right cuz then because then everything is tied together which is great because you have your heat coming off of it you have your domestic hot water coming off of it and then you can just size it appropriate based on the number of people because they fluctuate in BTU so it's nice is a you know hot water heater it Heats it up brings it to Temp and then you use it but then when you don't use it the temperature drops but then it has to kick on again to heat it back up with these on demand heaters it Heats it in a coil near instantaneously and so you don't have that lag time and those energy draws so I want to leave a lowc carbon footprint I want to curate a great experience for my tenant and I want to have something that's low maintenance to fix the beauty of design of an IBC is it's seven Parts when you become a dealer for IBC you get a suitcase which has those seven Parts in it I'm never down for more than two hours I don't have to worry about the laws about heating being at least 58 degrees and if it's less than 58 degrees for eight hours now we're talking about a health code violation this never puts me in a position from a product perspective where I have to worry about that and as a landlord we're trying to curate that best experience we can for our tenants we're trying to find a way to better maintain our systems that are low maintenance and something that if it breaks I can fix it quickly from my this might apply to all the questions of Maintenance I assume that on the front end when you look at putting cash out of pocket sometimes the higher quality lower maintenance long run it's a different equation on how how much it's going to cost you over the next 20 years as opposed to this one would it cost me more to that then I'm in the South so I don't use boilers as much but I would assume that's going to cost you more on the front end than putting like a a heat pump or you know something would be like an air forced air kind of unit but yeah so I mean so what we what we typically look at is you know because again with a heat pump and being able to do like essentially Mini Splits right so when you're doing those mini splits they're heat and cold um and every house down in the South has them up in the Northeast they usually can't keep up with the cold weather right and so what we look for is we look for that domestic Hot Water Production but we also look for Force top water which is kind of like if you're anything you know basically north of Tennessee across the country you're going to need the ability to heat pretty well um and so this one asset gives you the ability to when you implement it it's only about 20 to 30% more expensive than your other option but the longevity and the ease of use and the what we call the swan method sleep well at night method which we got from one of our students in our course uh he just said you know he's a military guy he's like everything I do is so I can swan I was like what is a swan he explains it and I said yeah I want to sleep well at night I want to know that if I get the call that they don't have heat or they don't have hot water that I'm back up and going in two hours yeah yeah I think that principle applies to a lot if you can spend 20% more but then you look at the long you own this property as a longterm landlord make can pay off big time so absolutely cool so we're in the basement heating air one more question are most of your units multi-units or do you have single family like how would you apply that that unit so I do singles I'm my mostly two three and four unit buildings almost all but I do have a couple singles and I've got a couple you know 6 8 10 12s um but yeah when we look at it we really that rule applies for anything we want to standardize on a system that that way our guy knows so we've done 33 of those ibcs in the last five years and we've had two maintenance calls right you can't get away from that and if you do have a maintenance call there's not a question of oh which part do we need is like IBC take the take the suitcase out there you go exactly break the suit out put the put and put the fan in and we're done you know and then people and then the tenants are astonished right because they've had other landlords and they're like it's done it's fixed oh yeah our hot water's back yeah we fixed it have no idea so we're curating an amazing experience that breeds loyalty from our tenant to want to stay with us yeah which is key the most expensive thing is turnover yeah beautiful all right so we're going to continue this conversation about building your ideal bulletproof rental property from a maintenance standpoint we covered heating and air hot water what else would you work on so the other thing is is you know what what costs us the most money is a water leak that's what costs us the most money so in small multifamilies twos threes and fours and certainly for older buildings that we own the biggest issue is everybody's seen it when they go down in that basement they see that pretty little star valve and then they see all the corrosion around it because it hasn't been turned off or on in 20 years and so the issue is is when you then find that star valve you can't move it it's frozen so you're stuck the water's going your only option is to shut off the main to the entire building well now you have an entire building building with no water that can be a problem it's frowned upon so the idea is when you have the ability when I take over a house we go in and we actually cut in shut offs to each unit in the basement quarter turn ball valves it's extremely inexpensive you can get a plumber in there for literally two hours and he can get you ball valves to every single unit so you now have a shut off in the basement that anyone can access on an emergency you get that water off and you don't have to worry about it and you're and you're isolating the problem you're only taking care of the unit that has the problem of the leak everybody else doesn't even know that there's an issue yeah I've even heard some landlords go to the extreme of like you got to assume that tennis don't know necessarily know how to turn the water off yes they'll put it in the bathroom they they'll just put valves everywhere because it's so cheap to do they like put a valve under the kitchen sink put a valve I mean I know that's I don't haven't done that myself but I think that's it's smart to think about like what's the worst case scenario you can think about from a maintenance standpoint is water running all over the house and a tenant is say I don't know how to fix this they might have good intentions but they're calling you you're traveling the property manager doesn't hear it so having like on the refrigerator with a magnet turn off the valve into look under the sink turn the valve off exactly it could be a lifesaver it could save you a ton of money five 10,000 bucks and a lot of times let's face it you know a lot of times our deductibles are higher than that or are you going to file a claim for five grand right heck no because you can't take that hit on your entire on all your properties insurance going up yeah they're going to pay themselves back 3x yeah something I thought about a lot Matt lately is not not only the valves but also just the plumbing system as a whole I buy a lot of 1950s properties in the South and you get the old cast iron you know plumbing supply lines and and I it's come to me I've had so many like copper and cast iron leaks and corrosion issues that like when I buy the property why I want I just go in and replace the entire supply line system with new lines new valves I'm just curious what if you were going to do that what kind of materials would you use for that yeah so I think you can go a couple of different routes is you know if if I've already got copper there I really love copper you know especially in the South because it's not nearly as prone to burst as it in the is in the Northeast where I am and so I actually love copper so what I would probably do is I would go in there and I would look and just change out all the fittings with compression fittings and you know we we use one of those compression systems where you basically can buy them they're they're between four and 15 bucks per fitting you get them in there use your compression tool and that's something that you don't even need a plumber to do if you're handy you can actually do it yourself you can cut it out yourself you can just shut the water off to the house when you're doing that little project so that's one of the things that we would do um the other thing that's kind of like more attractive is you know if you wanted to really go full bore is you just put pecs throughout the entire house yeah you know because it's so flexible you can get it up into wall cavities it it makes it really really easy I just say I love dirting out about products I mean this is just the best right people don't do this enough like like come on YouTube you like this stuff yeah and then then they're looking at their pum and their pum is like well what you really need is a ball bearing and a Fetzer valve and you're like a what a what you know so our audience are Real Estate Investors and I I'll confess here I'm not a handy person my wife will confess to this too like I'm good at make a punch list I'm good at like diagnosing problems but I think there's a lot of variability whether you're somebody who is all into maintenance doing it yourself that's awesome if you're somebody who needs to hire somebody else cool but you do need to know about this stuff because I I've made so many mistakes as a for years as a landlord not really understanding how my property is built and how it's put together thinking oh this property is the same as this one no it's not like it's cost me three or four or $500 more per month on a property like that is not not maintenance optimized versus another one that is so this stuff we're talking about I mean this is this is a big deal this is the bread and butter I mean this is the whole reason that you know when I was doing this stuff and I was dying in the beginning as a landlord because I was just I was getting eaten alive by you know a property manager I was getting eaten alive by every contractor that I hired and every problem that they found and so you know one of the reasons that I got into this and and then now have a course that teaches all this stuff is because I was just getting crushed and so it's so important to have a working knowledge to understand how these systems work how the house Works what it's comprised of the different materials that you use that's one of the things we spend a lot of time on in our boot camps teaching people is we can get rid of all the smoke and mirrors around this and put you in a dominant position to be able to manage your asset the best you can possibly manage itly huge well let's let's keep making a list for everybody so I'm also curious about surfaces like I'm think of exterior surfaces interior floors things like that tell me do you have any any go-to materials let's start outside on the exterior of your building if you had the W your magic wand you had the perfect exterior of a building from a maintenance standpoint what would that look like yeah I mean the ideally it would be like a Hardy Backer but price-wise that's going to price you out of you know you better be selling million doll homes if you're using Hardy Backer and so for me it's just uh what we would do is typically there's you know three levels or four levels of a product we're never buying the bottom one we're rarely buying the two one up from the bottom the next one up from the bottom we're typically buying the one just below the top line product because when you look at like vinyl siding you know like certainty made's a great product for vinyl siding when we look at that vinyl siding product it is actually thicker gauge and so you have to worry about Sun reflection off of Windows you have to worry not so much about the insular quality but just when it gets hit with a baseball a lot more lot more Sho out rocks exact on weed whackers like you see the cheap stuff right where you go through a neighborhood and you know clearly in like 1989 there was a guy driving through with 70 square worth a yellow and then the entire neighborhood's yellow and then there's chips missing out of all these and it's just you look at it just like and you can't even get that yellow anymore so you're done it's Faded by the sun anyway yeah it's faded it so bad so this gives you the opportunity to buy something that is not going to chip it's not going to crack and then I always recommend when you do that house you just have one extra box of it sitting there because that will carry you forever now there's better material and better Plastics that are kind of anti-fade so I have buildings that I've done 10 years ago with a better product and they still look just as as they did the day they were done yeah I'm with you when I'm remodeling and having to go back for on a budget I will go with a higher grade uh plastic vinyl but my my dream is to have a all brick exterior yeah with a metal trim metal flat flashing maybe maybe vinyl flashing windows that are uh not wood I just wrote a tweet this morning I want no wood on the exterior of my property agreed you have to paint it you scra oh scrape it and it rots and it gets pest forget it it's it's beautiful like I'm a sucker for old houses like I love old houses but but man for a rental property you want Stone you want brick you want maybe vinyl high grade vinyl but brick stone metal something like that on the exterior that can last for decades without having a problem whereas wood every five years you're you're in in decks are another issue I don't know what you think about decks but I I recently you know I've had to replace tons and tons of wood decks even though you treat them even though you stain them if you can have composite that's one of those things that cost you more on the front but if you're going to own this property for 20 years yeah composite wood would be excellent right every every other year you get it professionally power washed and in 20 years that deck's still going to be beautiful and there's no way any pressure treating no matter what you do no matter how you treat it in 20 years there's no way it's going to look like it did in year two and that's the thing is you know are you managing an asset or are you managing a property I'm managing an asset so I want to create long-term value and long-term wealth in the asset that way the day that I go to sell I'm not the guy that I'm buying from today that let his property fall apart exactly that's why we got a deal on in the first place exactly right take care exactly all right let's keep on with surfaces you go inside people are walking a lot I I know when my first rental properties I bought I had brand new carpet and then I got it back a year later and there's this huge pink Kool-Aid stain or wine stain in the living room brand new carpet I I don't like carpet so tell me tell me what you what you try to go with when you're rental property yeah when we find when we buy something with carpet we rip it all out it's just that simple we are the antip police we have no interest in carpet the only place we will allow it is we use 8B pad with a high plush on the stairs to reduce Noise Okay it's the only place we do it we don't want wood stairs they're expensive to refinish they typically get nicked up but the most important thing is they create noise so we want to do everything we can to act like we live there curate an amazing experience and that means no loud stairs so we want eight PB carpet pad we want a nice High plush carpet that's going to drastically reduce the amount of noise that you're getting any other carpet in the house we're ripping up tax strips We're ripping up pad we're doing all of that stuff as far as what product we would select as as far as what we would use it's usually a combination if we have the ability to do like a like a red oak like a hardwood that's about 275 a foot three bucks a foot and then you can usually find fantastic Crews that are willing to put it in for a couple of bucks a foot so five bucks a square foot getting that stuff put in and getting a couple coats of poly and you poly that then you buff it then you poly it again and then you're finished good for 100 years with that kind of stuff yeah exactly and the nice thing is is that with most of that red oak stuff you you're using a 3/4 inch across uh you know uh Plank and when you're using that 34 inch across plank that's going to get you probably six or seven sandings which means that the next guy that buys the house the next guy that buys the house they're going to be good they're not going to have to replace it for like you said a 100 years yeah love it yeah what about lvp have you Ed luxury vinyl plank if you can't use wood yeah that's sadly that's the only other option right and so I think the idea there is we try not to use residential vinyl plank we try and use commercial vinyl plank you buy a commercial one they say hey if it's got a 15-year warranty and a commercial set setting what they don't tell you is it likely has a 30-year warranty in a residential setting right so you make sure that when you get the receipt you make sure that whoever you're buying it from that you save it because and make sure that if they have a system that it updates like LL you know big company out there that a lot of people have around you can just tell them hey put in your system that this is a residential so I'm detecting a theme Here is that number one you got to think longer term like I know the mistakes I made when I first started buying properties was thinking so shortterm I'm like I go look at the flooring the vinyl flooring and say oh this one's a125 a square foot it lows let me put that one in as opposed to one that might last you know 30 years instead of 5 years in rip whenever you move a piece of furniture that's right you know so even though it's $5 a s foot versus1 or $2 a sare foot a smart landlord might make that decision whether it's your roof whether it's your flooring whether it's your exterior surfaces I'm kind of that's the theme that I think I'm getting from you a lot yeah really the theme is use quality because we want to have that experience but the other thing too is is that you know when you're looking for scale right what we do is is we like to understand what our competition is doing in the market we know that from our perspective we have 137 units in our Market when we at those 137 units we look at the fact that our call rate I a issue rate is about a third what our competition is well that means I can grow three times a size before I have the number of issues he has or they have yeah this puts you in the driver's seat so what you really want to do is the problem is is that people have trouble scaling because they have to keep on going back and managing the asset they have to keep on going back and fixing this and taking care of that the tenant doesn't want that you don't want that and you can get around that often by using quality people that are installing good products and it doesn't mean you're buying the Rolls-Royce of everything it just means you're you know not not buying junk all right two questions one is about picking quality one of the issues I've had is that even knowing what a quality product is like sometimes you have the most expensive product they're portrayed as a quality product how do you actually do how do you figure out what quality means because sometimes it's just hard to figure out yeah let's start with lvp right you know cuz there are a billion different ones you're like oh yeah this color looks like this color but this one's $2 and this one's $5 well what the difference is is it's usually wear layer It's usually the thickness of the actual plank that matters um and so it's really being comparative you know this one has a 30 M wear layer this one has a 10 mil wear layer well I don't want a 10 mil wear layer I will take a 30 because I want that extra wear layer so it's being able to understand even just comparatively you don't have to become a flowing expert it's really simple this one it will give you all the statistics this one will give you all the statistics once you understand wear layer and thickness there's not a whole lot more to it the other thing you can do too is you want to see if if you want to see if lvp is junk take your thumb put it on the corner and push it you can snap it that stuff's junk I got you and I say there's probably a similar process with plumbing materials probably similar process with you know any any material I guess you just you got to study it a little bit to say Google it YouTube it what's a quality what's the difference between cheap and quality and just educate yourself a little bit and you can figure out what that is yeah usually I mean a lot of times when you go into any of the stores when you go into any of these places you can actually look and they'll have a sticker right on it which will tell you all that stuff and so you can take a five minute 10 minute crash course that's one of the things we talk a lot about in our boot camp is products because people are going and they're doing the work does it cost you any more to have a plumber install a 4-year warranted water heater than an 8-year warranted water heater it doesn't cost another dime that heater might be an extra 100 or 200 bucks worth it well worth it yeah all right so we've talked about exterior surfaces interior surfaces we've talked about the hot water the hea he heating and air unit what else if we if we had to like give people like the other Hot Topics that related to maintenance anything else come to mind we like I have my ideal property would have to have this to be bulletproof yeah so I think if you're getting get bulletproof one of the biggest differences that I think people don't pay enough attention to is a lot of times tenants May complain about noise but 90% of the time they don't CLA complain about noise in these multifamilies right and so what then what ends up happening is you end up with a lot of turnover in that unit you're just like why is that unit keep on turning over it's pretty it's in the right area it's got plenty of parking it has plenty of features and so one of the things that people make the biggest mistake about is not understanding that there's a sound problem yeah very often the easiest way to deal with that sound problem is using a product called quiet Rock quiet rock is essentially an engineered uh sheetrock that you can buy in inch thick uh and it actually has a rubber metal membrane that goes through the middle it's like stacking eight pieces of half inch sheetrock on top of each other but you only have one inch okay the ability to put that on only the party wall which is any wall That's shared with another unit that's the party wall put that on any door every any wall that you want and that's going to Dr drastically reduce the amount of noise that you're having and likely you're going to have longer duration tenants beautiful I love that yeah I've got duplexes I've got fourplexes would you if you have a up down unit have you ever ceilings as well absolutely yeah and again depending on what we're looking at you know if it's something that we're already rehabbing what we're going to do is we're going to do an extra step we're going to put something like a a some sort of a mineral wool or something like that up in the ceiling as well um and then the other thing you do is then you strap the ceiling because that noise comes from vibration so I put the mineral wool up there we put the strapping on the ceiling and then we'll put the quiet Rock On The Ceiling if we're rehabbing it and we never get people that move out because of noise I love it that's great great tip all right anything else you can think of we've covered a lot here but what what what else is essential for a maintenance maintenance house I I think the I think the last thing is you know uh Roofing it around your chimneys you got to make sure that you know your chimney is uh you know properly flashed in properly L it in and don't cheap out get a 30-year architectural shingle don't go with the triple tabs you know you're going to save maybe 20% on that job but you might get 20 years and in about 10 years your roof's going to look tired so you might as well go with a nice 30-year architectural shingle use something called uh Grace ice and water Shield don't just have them do the bottom layer have them do the next layer up as well a lot of times those you know the uh the ice dams and things like that can occur because you're getting bad passage of insulation I think the last thing I would say is along that whole roof system is really just talking about insulation in the Attic if you do your best now it's count intuitive right landlords don't want to spend the money on extra insulation because they don't pay the heat bill okay what if let's just say you actually put great insulation there in the Attic you had a good quality heat system now you can put yourself in a position where the tenant's not going to leave because they got a $500 heat bill in January so am I helping the tenant out yeah absolutely is it my expense absolutely is it going to keep their cost flow absolutely but what does that allow me to do it allows me to have pricing pressure on the upward fashion on rent yeah and I think the attitude I'm getting from you which I totally resonate with is that we're not in a like a counter benef our situation isn't counter the tenant we actually align we're align with them if they if they win if they are happy if they enjoy living there we win literally because they stay longer they are happy they tell their friends about you it's a win I mean so I've never that the slum Lord mentality it bugs the crap out of me it just I I don't get it I don't understand it not only just because it's even if you want to be selfish is not right because you're G to get higher quality tenants you're they're going to stay longer even if it weren't the right thing to do it's it's the selfish thing to do as well yeah I mean the cheap becomes expensive and so if we can curate an amazing experience for our tenants they stay there's loyalty the thing I'm most proud of is my renewal rate you know if we've chosen to renew with the tenant we have like a 93% renewal rate when you're talking about 137 units I can't keep an agent busy full time but there slumlords they keep agents busy all the time and they just have no idea and they end up working with much smaller margin and then they have the reputation of not being a good landlord you only have one name act like it yep Matt The Lumberjack landlord this has been awesome I want you to give you a chance to tell people about yourself where they can find you if they want to connect with you yeah sure so at The Lumberjack landlord um we actually have a course uh we spend time on YouTube answering questions every Sunday for two hours where we just answer people's questions about landlording you know I'm a self manager I retired three days ago um conratulations and so yeah uh I'm waiting your six week thing I heard that that peaked my ears right away I was like 6 weeks that's going to probably be me um but happened right away and and uh and so yeah I'm three days into retirement it's very uncomfortable um but yeah find us on YouTube and Instagram and we do a lot of projects we actually I bought a jail and so I'm rehabbing a jail right now love it love the creativity so cool I'm going to follow your channel as well I'll have links to all the to your YouTube channel to your coures your Instagram below thanks for being on with me awesome appreciate it coach all right Matt in this video we got very specific about how to make your Ral bulletproof from a maintenance standpoint one thing we didn't cover is how to actually do the system or the process of maintaining your rental properties both the regular maintenance and the preventative maintenance that avoids future problems so in the next video I go over my process of annually inspecting a rental property and all the specific things I look for to avoid major maintenance costs and I even give you a free checklist that you can use to inspect and maintain your own rental properties year round you can watch the video by clicking the link above me here or in the podcast or YouTube description below

Channel: Coach Carson

Views: 53,520

Keywords: Coach Carson, Coach Carson podcast, Coach Carson rental, rental property maintenance, landlord tips, low maintenance rentals, tenant-friendly properties, property upkeep, durable materials, rental property renovations, property management, real estate investing, landlord advice, tenant satisfaction, energy efficiency, noise reduction, rental property improvements, property value growth

Id: 3n6D8_M-sxQ

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2024