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Short Wave Sportfishing

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 21:12:23 -0400, "JimH" ask wrote:

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 19:39:49 -0400, "JimH" ask wrote:

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:10:15 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:

Never mind. The other option is to just let the windows go to hell, and
replace them with modern ones sooner than I wanted to.

Best move I ever made.

I replaced 31 of them in one of our apartment houses to the new vinyl
type.

Saved me a ton of money on heating costs.

Your tenants do not pay for their heat and AC??

Nope - it's in the rent.

Expenses are controlled by usage. We allow a certain amount of
kilowatts and gallons of oil. If they stay under that amount, they
are golden. If they go over, there is a rent surcharge for what they
used plus 5% for the annoyance factor although it's not called that in
the rental agreement. :)

You don't make your money on rents I'll tell you that much. You need
to have a lot of apartments to make money. We make tenants pay for
rental insurance for example while we carry the overall fire and
liability insurance. They have an option of riding on our policies or
getting their own. And with taxes, town usage taxes like water and
sewer plus property taxes you are lucky if you make a couple of
hundred dollars as "income".

For investors like me, it's more about improving the property and
making the units pay for themselves waiting out the enivitable
increase in property value. People have to live somewhere and it's a
good business if you can make it pay for itself and we've managed to
do that.

Rising fuel/oil prices as well a big jumps in your property/GL insurance
rates had to take a major hit on you.

Actually, it wasn't as bad as you might think. I belong to a fuel
co-op. You buy in with $10K investment and all purchases after that
are at wholesale. If you get out, you roll over the $10K to somebody
who wants to buy in only now it will cost $16K to buy in. The co-op
keeps $2K and I get the rest. I joined years ago and it's more than
paid for itself.

Same thing with gas. While there is a savings for gas, it's only
about .40¢ a gallon and you are limited in the amount you can remove
at any one time because of associated storage and environmental
problems. I think the gas co-op is going to collapse because of
ethanol anyway - it's harder to store than just straight gas. Which
is fine - we won't lose the initial investment and it worked for a for
a long time.

Having your tenants being able to piggy back on your commercial insurance
with their tenants insurance *may* be costing you. The norm is for them
to get their own coverage separate of yours.

If you have not had your insurance prospected (sent to bid) recently by your
agent this is a great time to do so....it is a buyers market. Unless you
have not already done so you may also want to see what the difference in
premiums would be with the insurance package split with a personal lines and
commercial packages, even if it means different insurance companies.

Been there - done that. All the commercial insurance is posted for a
two year contract bid - full replacement policy with built in
inflator. The odd thing is that over the past five years, our
insurance costs have gone down slightly instead of up and we offer the
same contract every time it comes up.

The renter riders almost always come up cheaper than what the tenants
can come up with on their own - sometimes they don't. The caveat
there is that all possessions have to be documented and videotaped to
be covered. We have a very smart lawyer who handles all this and he
does an outstanding job.

I've found that the key to insurance is having the units inspected
yearly for structure, function and bugs. Once that's documented, the
rest just seems to fall into place.