Sometimes we look at management companies as an expensive line item on the budget. However - I need to ask you - Are they really that costly?
Recorded:
Recorded Jan 2 2021
Host:
Kassandra Taggart
Dave Stroh - KBYR Radio
Links:
The Landlord's Almanac
Facebook Page
Website
Property Management
Donations
Sponsor the club
Book: Pain or Profit
Sponsor:
Real Property Management Last Frontier
Sometimes we look at management companies as an expensive line item on the budget. However - I need to ask you - Are they really that costly?
Recorded:
Recorded Jan 2 2021
Host:
Kassandra Taggart
Dave Stroh - KBYR Radio
Links:
The Landlord's Almanac
Facebook Page
Website
Property Management
Donations
Sponsor the club
Book: Pain or Profit
Sponsor:
Real Property Management Last Frontier
Good morning. And welcome. I want you to be my co-host this morning. Kassandra Taggart is the president of Real Property Management Last Frontier, a property management company here in Anchorage. She is also the president. Of the landlord's Almanac, one of the largest landlord clubs in the country dedicated to networking, supporting, and training professional landlords. And she is the author of the popular book, paint or profit secrets of profitable rental property investors. She joins us now from the safety of her home office
Kassandra Taggart:Good
Dave Stohr:morning well, if you listen to the radio specifically, K B Y R, then you know, that real property management last frontier provides professional property management services, but you can only learn so much in just 60 seconds this morning, we take an in-depth look at just what it is. That real property management last frontier does for each and every client that employs their services. It is the topic of our first conversation this morning with Kassandra, you get to talk about yourself this morning. If a landlord and or investor wanted to make more time in their life for the living of life, then wouldn't hiring a property management company like yours. Be the way to go about living a life filled with more time.
Kassandra Taggart:When you think about time, time, and money is valuable these days, you know, you want to spend time with your profession, with your family, with your friends and rentals do take a lot of time. It's the business. And sometimes it's a lot more affordable to hire a third party, to help do all of the little knickknacks things like keeping track of papers. so that way you don't have to, you can get back to your life.
Dave Stohr:You know, when I broke it all down, Kassandra, all the services that you provide to landlords and or investors, it's a wonder they could do anything at all, but manage their properties on a full-time basis, which is a job that they probably left to pursue a life of freedom. What does a property owner have to do after they have hired real property management, last frontier.
Kassandra Taggart:So after they hired
Dave Stohr:us,
Kassandra Taggart:basically, really what they have to do is what we call managing of the manager. And you have to remember, you are still the landlord, you still own the property and you still make the decisions on the property. The things that we take off your plate is like recordkeeping accounting. A lot of the tenant phone calls, how do I pay my rent or has to deal with those phone calls you no longer have to deal with. Showing up at the courthouse, you just have to say, Hey, my goal for you in the courthouse today is to get that tenant out. So do whatever it takes to make that happen or maximize my dollar. That's what I care about. And then that's what we'll negotiate for you without you having to be in all the day-to-day details. So it gives you your time back.
Dave Stohr:I want to delve into each of those separately. What is your company's definition of ongoing communication and between what parties is that communication happening?
Kassandra Taggart:There's a couple of different ways. We do that to make it to where you're always informed on a property. So the first one is the online portals. Online portal allows you to see your accounting statements. We produce the accounting statements three times a month. So every time there's any activity going on with the financials, you'll see it right away on your portal. Whenever you wish to log in, to look at your stuff or your financials. We also have a system where anytime something happens to your property, you will be notified automatically by email. So for example, 10, it gets notice. She'll be notified by email. We take a deposit on your property. You will be notified. You get a work order. You're going to get an email notification about it. A lot of the notification, we're going to go ahead and take care of for you, but you will be informed of it. So you can. Chime in if you wish to or not, and get back to work. And some of the other things that we do with ongoing communication is with your tenant. So the tenant is always meeting a customer service approach. It's a lot of times the owners are trying to manage their own property, but they're at work nine to five. They can't be taking phone calls right now. Whereas we can take those phone calls for you. And help the tenant learn how to turn their thermostat on or off or help the tenant learn how to pay their rent. For example,
Dave Stohr:me there for a second, is it isn't hard to contact real property management. If you are a tenant of a building and have a problem or a concern in a building that you're servicing.
Kassandra Taggart:on the tenants and on the owner side, we have multiple ways for communication. We do a really good job at trying to make sure we satisfy all the generations and all of the people's communication styles that we have. So we've got email, we've got phones, we've got texts. We've got portals. We've got portals are great because you could take a picture or do a video and then submit it in online. We've got. Where you can come to our Dropbox locations and start dropping off rents as well. There's plenty of ways to get the information to us, and then we'll be responding accordingly as fast as we can,
Dave Stohr:since clients know what's happening on a day-to-day basis on from those portals concerning their properties. Do you take action in their name and then inform the client what has happened at their properties?
Kassandra Taggart:here's a great example of where we do that. A tenant calls us and says, Hey, we don't have heat in our house. And the temperature is 45. Obviously, you don't want us calling you and saying, Hey, how do you feel about that? Obviously you want to get that taken care of before you start having other problems. So what we'll do is the tenant is going to notify us by phone, emergency line text message or by email, however they want to notify us. And then what we'll do is send you a notification saying it's happening. Oh, but then the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to actually start jumping on the issue. We are connected with a whole bunch of maintenance vendors that can dispatch to that property and start fixing it right away or drop off space heaters right away to avoid it from becoming a pipe braids and becoming thousands and thousands of dollars of bills for you. Sure. When I was looking at your company, I was surprised to realize that you are a comprehensive marketing and advertising company. How does a client get their property rented out more quickly when they use real property management last frontier? Another feature that we have as a full service management company is our marketing platform. So the marketing platform that we do is we have the ability to take one little rental property and blast it over thousands and thousands of websites, because for us to pay a thousand bucks on marketing for all of our rental properties, and then we can hit thousands of websites between Facebook and Craigslist, the paid advertising, apartments.com, realtor.com and so forth. Well, it's for you. You paying a thousand dollars would not be cost-effective and therefore it makes it too expensive. So then you're stuck with just doing management of marketing your property only on Facebook or only on the free website, whereas us, because we have 20 to 30 properties a month that we're renting. We go ahead and pay the thousand dollars a month on marketing, which gives your property in advantage and it makes it to where you have the, the marketing horsepower of videos, walkthrough, videos, scheduling technology, a wide angle camera, picture technology watermarking for the scammers. Technology where it says the walking score to the local grocery store, for example, all of that comes in automatically within our system that you don't have to worry about.
Dave Stohr:It sounds very 21st century. It really does. What does real property management last front deer tier do to make sure that a property gets and stays rented?
Kassandra Taggart:Many things. on the process of getting something rented we do a lot of things to make sure that not only do we find the qualified tenant that can pay rent, but also make sure that we're maximizing your dollar. So when we go to Mark as your rental property, we'll get a whole bunch of applications on the applications. We make sure that they still have a job. So we're going to check on that for you, make sure that their pay stubs really are real pay stub so that they can make sure they pay their rent. And then we have a system in place with how we collect the rent to make sure that. Just because I have one application and they haven't dropped off money for the property. We'll continue marketing the property until we get somebody to drop off the money and secure the property rather than, Oh, I finally talked to somebody, let's pull it off market to hold it for them. Well, we're not maximizing your profits. And we have the ability to keep marketing the property until we get a secure sign, me sign deposits paid deposit. When we have a process in place to make sure that those funds clear the bank, not just here, I have a check and it's going to bounce. So there's lots of things that we do to get the tenant. And then when we finally get the tenant, we have a lot of features to make sure we service them, to keep them as happy as possible with maintenance and repairs and how to pay rent and make it super easy to do business. So they can also get back to their lives.
Dave Stohr:KAssandra over the years, I've seen landlords go from house to house, to house to collect the rent. How do you make rent collection faster and less stressful?
Kassandra Taggart:Oh, gosh, I remember those days, days. That's how old I am. Right. My grandfather used to make us knock on those doors house to house to collect the rent check, but today's world is a whole different world. We were one of the first in the state of Alaska to introduce online payments abilities. So about 87% of our tenants actually pay online with either credit card, debit card or an ACH where it hooks up to their bank accounts. And of those almost all of them are studying it up to where it's an automatic payment. So we no longer have to go door to door. It's automatically paid on the first to ensure that. The money clears the bank fast enough to clear, and they don't have to worry about their late fees and so forth. So we have a lot of utilization of the online world per se, to create speed, which creates the ability to serve as our landlords and our tenants is way faster than it used to be.
Dave Stohr:Cassandra are the days of writing out a check for rent almost over, is it almost obsolete and old school that we won't see that very much longer?
Kassandra Taggart:It's very obsolete now I would say out of all of our tenants, which we have somewhere around 800 tenants at the moment and out of all of them, I would say maybe 10 20, write a check. That's it, all of the others do. Online payments. None of them be cash and all of them do money order cash or check checks or online pay. But it's a very small amount that even do checks anymore.
Dave Stohr:Amazing thorough tenant screening and selection is so important. As you know, when real property management is involved. How thorough are we talking when it comes to tenant screening?
Kassandra Taggart:Tenant Screening is the Science of making all the headaches go away. And if you don't have the screening, you'll either do one of the two things. You'll either have bad screening and you end up letting all the tenants who can't pay rent, come in, and then they destroyed the property. Or you have to have a screening where nobody qualifies, because if they would have qualified to those standards, they would have just bought a house and never rented from you. So it's the science of getting really good screening versus really bad screening to get it filled and maximize your rent. But at the same time, making sure they qualify to rent the property and pay for the property. So we look at how long have they been on the job? What's their overall credit score? What type of collections do they have on their background? Is it just medical school loans or is it the utility companies like with GCI and ML P. Because, depending on what their collections are, will be a strong indicator if they're going to pay their rent on time. what I'm proud of Dave is that we just pulled our staff and out of all the tenants that RPM has place we have less than us. 0.3% have an eviction rate that tells you how good our screening is.
Dave Stohr:Absolutely amazing. So the science is so thorough that you can see a person or put a person in front of you and then realize, or not whether he or she will be able to pay the rent in the near future.
Kassandra Taggart:That's how much volume we do with our company because we're processing 20, 30 rental properties a month, but that's, you know, about a thousand. 1500 applications a year because of that, we can quickly see trends of when tenants are all of a sudden starting to make pay stubs, which is a new thing now with COVID. And, and when they're starting to use their friends as a landlord reference rather than a landlord, so we can see trends of, of scamming. Before you realize it too, to reduce the problems that you could potentially have in the future.
Dave Stohr:I was going to ask you is it's getting harder with the science to get by you now.
Kassandra Taggart:Isn't it it's very much so. Because of the volume, we're able to quickly find the trends and the scams and avoid a lot of headaches, part landlords that used to, yeah. If you're, if you're a person who just does a few applications a year, you can accidentally fall to those traps. Cause you don't. Notice
Dave Stohr:when real property management last frontier says full service leasing, what does that all entail?
Kassandra Taggart:There are companies out there that will do a tiny piece of, of getting your property rented. For example, they will do just the background check and that's it. With us, we're going to do the marketing of the property and we're going to do selection of what the rent should be based on history and stats. When we're going to do all of the technology components for making sure we can do their background checks and checking in all 50 States, not just here, then we're going to do the holding process of, okay, you're now approved. Let's get you to hold the property for yourself when we're going to do the least dining. And we're going to use the leases that we've used with our lawyers. And then get it signed and we're going to do an hour long lease signing, meeting with the tenants. And we're going to say, here's what the lease is. Here's what happens. Here's what you do when this happens, make sure our phone number and everything is in your phone. So if something happens, you can call us quickly things to that nature. And all of it's been tweaked over the years to maximize time as well. Speed as well as quality of the tenant experience and to make sure that the landlord is protected in the process. So that's full service. We do the whole line.
Dave Stohr:Does your company conduct regular inspections of each and every property?
Kassandra Taggart:When the landlord signs the management contract to hire us, we also asked them. How often would they like be inspections to take place and to be very clear it's property. Walk-throughs where we're checking on the property for maintenance. We're checking on if there's upcoming issues we're checking to see if the tenant needs help in any way. And we'll ask the landlord. Do you want to do it every six months? Do you want to do it every quarter or do you want to do it just on a yearly basis? We recommend a minimum of every six months, because a lot can happen in six months with a property. We could walk into a property and find out that the tenant, you know, has been having medical issues and no longer can clean up after themselves, which is an issue with mice and bugs. And we need to have a conversation or we could walk into a place. And the tenant doesn't know that a soft floor is a good thing or a bad thing. So. Well, no, because we do those inspections and a soft floor is a very bad thing. It can cause thousands of dollars of damage, but attendant doesn't know sometimes. So inspections is a great way to service the tenant as well as protect the property.
Dave Stohr:I know that every property owner has had to respond to that dreaded call at 2:00 AM in the morning because of maintenance problems. Are you able to dispatch service people out at all hours of the day or night to remedy a solution for your clients?
Kassandra Taggart:That is a very special, special thing that our company does. And I, I would like to say that I'm the leader in this, what we designed from day one with the maintenance company, because I'm an investor. I believe in this, that I think the person who should be answering the emergency line is an actual maintenance technician, because then they can take the phone call and go, Oh, you just need to put some batteries in thermostat and save me hundreds of dollars from sending somebody in the middle of the night to go take care of something. So we do have a 24 seven emergency line and it's answered live by a maintenance person that can sit there and troubleshoot before they dispatch anybody to the property. That's a big thing because it saves landlords a lot of money.
Dave Stohr:When you said live, I got goosebumps because you don't hear that every day can real property management assist the client in keeping their maintenance costs down, which can fly off the handle at any time.
Kassandra Taggart:Oh, gosh, maintenance can be very unplanned. But there's a lot that you can do to make it where maintenance is a planned expense and in the budget and avoid surprises. That is actually the number two fear that most landlords have is unplanned maintenance, because they don't know if they have enough savings or reserves built up for that item. So, what we do is every property that we bring on to the company is we look at the property and say, what are all the things we need to plan for such, just gutter, cleaning, furnace inspections, sprinkler inspection routine inspections of the interior. Dry cleanings is a big one. Fireplace chimney. The list goes on. And then what we do is we put that property on a routine schedule to make sure those inspections happen. So that way it reduces the chance of a fire reduces the chance of having a catastrophic. I spilled up water damming off of gutters. For example,
Dave Stohr:you know, one of the hardest parts of being a property owner in, you know, this is handling evictions, this real property management consider themselves strict when it comes to that process.
Kassandra Taggart:We are fairly strict when it comes to evictions, as long as the landlords let us what we, what we tend to do. And a lot of people don't understand this is that we have a process in place that is very strict and very streamlined. However, we also are able to create very strategic points of negotiations. To make it where the tenant will try to bring it current or try to bring things good again. And they're done with like a current approach, for example, Hey, if you do this, I'll do this that way. We understand if the tenant is just talking a lot and not actually having any intentions of trying to make things good. Or if they really are trying, they're actually going to get a little to say, Hey, I am trying, here's what I can give to avoid all the problems. So that's the trick that we do to hold people accountable, as well as see if they really mean what they're going to do.
Dave Stohr:How would you describe the system within real property management, last frontier that handles accounting for your clients? Maybe those who are not all that good with numbers.
Kassandra Taggart:I am proud of my accounting department. They are very accurate and they're very systematic and making sure the follow through with everything is there. And. Then what they do because of our accounting professionals are also landlords. They understand that not everybody likes accounting, it can be boring for most people. So what they do is they make these customized reports that sit on everyone's portal and it looks like a checkbook register. Almost everybody can understand a checkbook register. So they make a check book register where you can see all the money coming in and out like a checkbook. So that way it makes sense. And you can read it just like you do with your personal budget.
Dave Stohr:When I talked to you about real property management and all of the services, it sounds as if your company helps protect a client's investment as if it were their own.
Kassandra Taggart:What a lot of people don't realize is that I am an investor as well. And half of my staff are investors as well. I pride myself in making sure that I have people in the team that are landlords as well. So we can understand your fears, your concerns. I tenants destroy my property. I understand what it feels like when I get that phone call. And I understand what it takes to get that property turned around because I've done it with my own money. And same with half my staff as well. So like makes it to where we have a deeper understanding and a deeper service level because we're in the same boat.
Dave Stohr:Do you assist your clients in protecting themselves legally instead of trying to go at all alone?
Kassandra Taggart:I'm not a lawyer, but I am a property manager that sees these cases all the time. I know which lawyers to hire to, to help a certain situations. And because I see all these cases all the time, I've seen strategies that work, and I've seen strategies that have felled on the legal front. And because you put us in place, we're able to put barriers in place. Between the risk and the liability on yourself, which is things that you wouldn't have never thought of. A great example was when a tenant is moving in, in the middle of the month, we make them pay 30 days of rent, not, not the prorated amount, because you want as much money as possible. When you starting a brand new relationship with them.
Dave Stohr:Because your company is a new set of eyes. When you walk into a property, when you see costs within a client's investment, do you consult with the client to help minimize those costs?
Kassandra Taggart:We do consulting all the time. It's one of those things where we'll sit down on a frequent basis and look at accounts and say, Oh, we need to work on your water bill because the water bill people sends a notification that the water usage is up. And we need to figure out what's going on. And that's when we'll dispatch work orders to investigate, because if we don't watch those from the accounting perspective and from our processes, you'll end up with a high water bill for months and not, we'll take almost all your profits if you're not careful. So there's a lot of consulting that we do, and there's a lot of systems in place to catch those things quickly to try to minimize any of your profits. Dillon is going away.
Dave Stohr:Should people manage their own property to save money or do they actually in the end pay more by trying to self-manage
Kassandra Taggart:I'm just gonna use myself as an example on this one. I wanted to do it myself and I did it myself because I thought I was the best. I thought I gave better service. I thought I was more personable. What actually happened is I made a mistake after mistake, after mistake and realized, wait a minute, maybe I'm not the best person. And the mistakes that I made was stuff like I couldn't keep up with all my papers because I was busy with, you know, soccer or whatever, or I couldn't give them the best service because I was busy with my client. I didn't really pay attention to my tenant, which made them not and made them move out. Or I took it personal when I shouldn't have. And that made it to where I was taken advantage of. And I shouldn't have, so rentals is personal, but at the same time it's business and separating it from doing it yourself versus having a third person be very unbiased, too. It makes it to where you don't accidentally lose money. And to be honest, we're very affordable and you will spend a lot of time. When you could be working with family or doing your day job, making more money than what you would be paying me in like a whole year.
Dave Stohr:Ken investors in landlords become more successful with a company like yours that is proven to be successful in property management.
Kassandra Taggart:Yeah, there is, I'll give a story on this one, cause it might, might give a little bit of perspective. There's a guy who had 10 units and he was doing it himself. And I found out that the things he was missing that we could bring to the table basically paid for us and gave him more money in his pocket. So things like we have collections in place. We have credit reporting in place. We have insurance thing insurance measures in place. And because of that, we would have paid for his kitchen fire. We, we would have collected money out of the collection companies. These are all things he couldn't do or didn't know to do as they do it yourself landlord. So when he turned us on, we were able to immediately get all those things in place and put more money in his pocket at the end of the year. And I remember the first year it happened, he called me at the beginning. He's like, all man, I'm nervous. I feel like I'm I'm, I'm. Sending money by having you. And then by the end of the year, he was saying, Oh my gosh, he put more money in my pocket. Now I have a tax problem. I gotta go work it out with my CPA.
Dave Stohr:If there is somebody out there right now, a landlord or an investor that wants to talk to you about managing their properties and their buildings, how can they get ahold of you? Couple of different ways. It depends on your personality and style. Our favorite is a phone call cause we like to consult with you tonight.(907) 290-2022. Or you can check out our website and then like all the contact us information where you can provide us your number and your phone number and your email, and best time to call you. And we can consult with you that way. You're listening to Cassandra. Tagard the president of real property management, last frontier Anchorage, and the author of the book, painter profit secrets of profitable rental property investors. I'm Dave stro, even the best landlords have questions. And we are asking them for Cassandra's best advice this morning. Here's your first question because Sandra, would you rent to someone with a really low credit score, less than 500, if you knew it was that low. Due to divorce.
Kassandra Taggart:Oh, that's always the tricky one, but at the same time, it's something I think a lot of people fall for because it's, it's easy to say, Oh, I'm going through the divorce. It looks like everything is bad. Well, you gotta remember that people in a divorce still have obligations. They'll have to pay and people that are going through divorce usually you'll see like, All of a sudden their payments will drop off, like in the last 60, 90 days kind of thing, why they get re situated with life and then they come back. It's not, they've been destroyed for many, many years, many, many months kind of thing. So people with very low credit score tend to actually have a story of many, many years and months of bad behavior, not just recent. So I would be wary and not do it.
Dave Stohr:Okay. There we go. There's your best advice. Here's your next question? How do you stay on top of a tenant's visitors? Not staying past the magical three days, thus allowing visitors to become tenants.
Kassandra Taggart:That's always a tricky one because you have with the course size that you can enforce. When you're standing in front of a judge, then you have what the law says. Then you have what your lease says. There's many, many, many variables to this. And I think the easiest way to answer this is to think of it as a business decision. Is that visitor causing harm? Is that visitor costing you money? Is that visitor being an issue? If yes, to any of those things, then start doing your 10 day notice process and following through with the issue, if not leave it alone. They're not hurting anything. If it's not hurting anything, you kind of have to just pick your battles sometimes.
Dave Stohr:Okay. Here's another question. A tenant in my building has complained about finding needles in the parking lot and around his car. Any advice on how to confirm my suspicion on those using
Kassandra Taggart:even if he found out who is using. You, you have to get the police involved. You can't, you can't just serve a notice saying, Hey, I think you're doing drugs. And I think you need to leave and dah and start creating a confrontation. Like you're the detective. You're not as effective and you're not the police. So my advice is yes. Try to kind of figure out who it is and then find to maybe remove that tenant out of the building. So that way it's no longer an issue. And then of course find a safe way to keep the property cleaned up in the meantime. Cause it's possible that it's the neighbor it's possible. It's people walking by. It's possible that. It's just your location that you're in and that's the nature of that location, unfortunately. So you may just need to buy a different building if you can't handle this or want to pay for cleaning it up. But yeah, research shoe, it might be, but your best bet is to just go ahead and give notices for that least to terminate, rather than trying to enforce, because you need to have the police prosecute and present evidence that it's real and you're not as detective. And the judge is going to want that when you're trying to evict somebody and put it on their record over drugs, when they're not convicted of it.
Dave Stohr:Here's another question. What do I need to do to cover myself and make sure that all is legal regarding communication through a translator during the duration of a family's Tennessee, that doesn't speak a lot of English.
Kassandra Taggart:We asked them the best way to handle somebody who has a different language is you might want to consider having a person that you hired that does the language interpretation for you. So it's a third party and in bias you can use a United way, has resources, various churches have resources because they care about their community and want to make sure that. They are not taken advantage of as well as communicating what to be a part of everything. So I recommend that you do that rather than sometimes a family member, because the family member will skew it just to get something that they might want. The last thing is, is always follow up with everything, but you an email summary of the conversation, because that will help. Avoid misinterpretation and miscommunication due to the language barrier.
Dave Stohr:Here's another question. How long should a good dryer expect to last in a rental unit?
Kassandra Taggart:Every dryer has a different life cycle. I've seen the ones that last a long time are like the whirlpools, the GEs. Then there's the cheaper appliance, like a Frigidaire sometimes, or an LG. That's very expensive as all these tech components that break down a lot. So it depends on the appliance, but my rule of thumb is the first time that that appliance needs a around 200,$250 repair. That's the time to start shopping for a new one, because then the recorders are going to be more costly than just buying a new appliance.
Dave Stohr:You have been around dryers for most of your life. What do you think of dryers in the 21st century? Are they too? Are they too technical?
Kassandra Taggart:you know, the millennials are like, I want more tech, but really what we want is we want things that work. So I'll give example, there's a person who converted their whole house to this text thermostat stuff that they had. And because the tech thermostat didn't think to the internet, the house ended up with no heat and we had to do an emergency call. At, at nine o'clock at night because the temperature went to 47 in that place, all because the techie thermostat wouldn't think to the internet and had nothing to do with plumbing. So there's pros and cons of it. I personally think in a rental situation, we just want things that work, not things that can potentially fell because of the cyber webs.
Dave Stohr:And speaking of utilities, is it the tenant's responsibility to request disconnecting from utilities when they move out?
Kassandra Taggart:You tell me, is there one of those things that you really should have it in your contract of who does what with turning it on, turning it off. If this happens, this is what's going to happen. Here's the rules, because without that clear guideline, it creates this. We personally, when the tenant moves out, if they want to keep paying for that utility bill and not turn it off of their name, that's their accountability. We've already got it. Cut off. Where, when they do turn it off, it automatically flips over. So it doesn't turn off off. So it's up to the tenant. If they want to, you know, do their paperwork actually, and actually get it turned off.
Dave Stohr:Here's another question. My tenants still can't pay rent due to COVID. Are there any agencies in Anchorage still offering assistance today?
Kassandra Taggart:There was a lot of agencies available. It's a matter of trying to get through to them because they are from boarded and busy and swamp. But there is still eight and there is still checks being handed out. In fact, I just did a report this month to see how many people got their January rent paid from assistance funds. And it's already over$25,000 that we received and rental assistance funds for tenants. So the money is still out there and it's still being sent out. So you just have to work maybe a little harder trying to connect to those resources, but they're there.
Dave Stohr:And I was going to ask, is there any pandemic relief for local landlords that you're hearing of?
Kassandra Taggart:I have not heard of any. I do know that there might still be a little bit of funds out of the Lutheran, which is administered through the United way. And two, one, one that is assistance to help with mortgage relief. And that would be what you'd landlords could do is ask for more mortgage relief assistance. And I believe they still have a little bit left in their fund that might help. I'm not sure as of today, but that's the last I've heard.
Dave Stohr:How many references should I ask for before I rent to someone?
Kassandra Taggart:Landlord references used to be a great place to really get Intel on somebody. But you have to remember in this town, it's kind of adjusted to where now they put their friend's name and numbers down. Or you might actually get a landlord that they're still with right now. And they're like, what? I didn't know they were leaving. And if they're a bad tenants, of course, they're going to give a good review because they don't want them anymore. But I recommend two to three is a good, healthy number to kind of get a tone potentially of who that person is. As a tenant.
Dave Stohr:One of our landlords wants to know, is it illegal for me to charge a monthly pet rent or fee.
Kassandra Taggart:There it's not illegal at this time to charge fees or deposits or monthly rent for pets. What is illegal just to be mindful is if it is a service animal, you cannot do charges for that service animal. And of course you have to follow a whole nother set of guidelines to make that be a thing.
Dave Stohr:Here's another question. Do you allow a renter to Airbnb the property they are renting from?
Kassandra Taggart:No. And not as a huge problem in certain areas like in New York and major cities, but now with COVID and the population adjustments in certain studies, it may not be so much of a thing. But no, it is not allowed. It's basically called subleasing and we do not allow that in our leases.
Dave Stohr:And one more question, Cassandra is paying the rent by check. It's still a good way to collect money or is online the way to go. We've talked about that today.
Kassandra Taggart:Yeah, tenants have spoken Senate's want the convenience of online because they want to deal with the landlord. Not often, they want to deal with their life and their family and not the landlord. So and with the stats showing 87% wanting to pay online. You guys need to find a way to make that happen or just let us do it for you.
Dave Stohr:As we head into the new year, are you making plans concerning your financial future? Is this the year that you decide to take action and begin to grow and build a lasting legacy through investing in real estate rental properties? Then let's talk with Cassandra who wants to join you? On that journey, every step of the way, Cassandra, the other day, I saw a sign that said Anchorage is dying. Are you optimistic and hopeful about the return of Anchorage as a city? That once thrived,
Kassandra Taggart:I believe that the people right now are stressed. They're frustrated. They're you know, we're, we're going through a difficult time where. Things are happening. That's a lot of negative, right? So people feel the desperation and they're feeling sad and they're, and they're having hard times, they're looking at bills and may not have the money to pay the bills. So there's a lot of desperation and dust and sadness going on. I don't think it's dying. No, I think the community is coming together and I think the community is trying to find solutions. I think that. They're trying to find a way to make things better and happier and be the Anchorage. It is. For example, there's a group of people going around putting Christmas lights up on everybody's houses and paying for their own Christmas lights to put it up. Just to light up Anchorage again, cause it is dark right now. Cause the sun's not up yet. You're going to see more of that coming out and lending a hand to help our fellow Alaskans. And I think that's going to be more predominant of a thing. And I think we just need to remember there's a lot of people who need help and those that can help, will help and should help. And you just got to find who they are sometimes. Cause they're not very loud. The people that are sad or are louder.
Dave Stohr:With the weight of the pandemic on top of is, is it depressing? The real estate investment market today?
Kassandra Taggart:The investment market is different. So what I need to make sure everybody understands is that a person who a true investor that has a plan that has a strategy and understands all the investment vehicles that can be used and strategies that can be used, they are still buying and they're still moving money and they are still making investments. But if you're not educated enough in the real estate world to understand the different. Types of properties you could buy during transitions and shifts in the economy. It might be good to sit back and listen to your PO, build your team, how professionals come around you and learn as much as you can before you pulled the trigger, because you can accidentally pull the trigger on a property that may not have a foundation, and it'll bankrupt. You, you don't want to do that right now. You don't want to do things that are risky. That can potentially take you out for several years. So just be careful.
Dave Stohr:What's the biggest thing you've learned about yourself and your investment practices during the last 11 months?
Kassandra Taggart:For me, it was insight that the properties that I purchased for myself to, to own when I went and purchased, I purposely did middle market properties. And middle market properties is, is, is not very risky. They, they don't have the awesome Excel spreadsheets, but they also don't have. The risky parts involved because it's the middle of the road, average Alaskan that's working in the average Laskin lifestyle type property. And so therefore I'm always able to find a tenant to fill that place. And it rents in 24 hours and the tenants are still paying rent and they still have jobs. So they're not dependent on like the hotel or retail or restaurant jobs. So for me, it was insight that middle of the road type rental middle average properties are a space investment. They're not very risky and it makes the worry to have a lot of headaches.
Dave Stohr:How can investors find out more about joining the landlords club here in Anchorage?
Kassandra Taggart:The most popular one is the Facebook group. We have a private Facebook group for those that are landlords that you can join and you just search the landlords Almanac. Slash Alaska and that'll be the private group. And that's where I donate a lot of our time to help those that have questions. So if nobody else answers your question, I, I will chime in to help you out.
Dave Stohr:Find out more about real property management, which we talked about at the top of the hour and all that your company does. Where can people go to find out more information?
Kassandra Taggart:To read about us is RPM last frontier.com or just call us even if you don't need our services, we'll be glad to help you out two nine zero two nine two two, Cassandra. We want to thank you for your knowledge and your compassion and your guidance over the last hour. You are, as I'm sure our listeners now know an invaluable resource and experienced advisor for those who were investing in real estate and taking their first step towards success. Have a good week.