各位大佬。 尽请指教。
8 units apartment building, totally 24 bedrooms with 24 bathrooms, currently rented by rooms---so totally 24 leases. Near a major university campus. Asking is about $1.5 million. Rent is $595/room including all utilities and internet. $595/ room x 24 rooms = $14280/month. But utilities paid by owner is about $2000/month.
1. Conditions pretty good. Built around 2006 and current owner did some renovation in 2019 with all new appliances/ flooring etc. There are a few deferred maintenance but not much.
2. Current management company sucks. Right now there are 3 rooms vacant, 3 tenants owe more than $2000 (rent due), and another 3 tenants owe several hundreds. Current rent collected is around $11000 --- $12000 per month.
We have 15 years experience dealing with student housing. We think we can turn it around after taking over.
3. Rent has more room to go higher after active management.
Two questions:
1. We lives about 80 miles away from the property (about 1.5 hours drive）。We plan to go there twice per week to manage the property at the beginning. After bad tenants kick out and good tenants move in, we expect to go there once a week. Is that practical? Since conditions of the property is not bad at all, main issue is to evict bad tenants and look for good ones, we think. Maybe we somehow under-estimate the work involved.
What do you think?
2. The property is not on the MLS. We have RE license and can act as buyer agent for ourself. Should we ask the listing agent the commission split or simply ask listing agent as our buyer agent? The market is pretty hot locally, but the property was on the market for 2 weeks unsold. Normally buyer agent's commission is around $35k. Right now It's hard to negotiate down the price with the sellers. 大家觉得应该去争取这个$35K的 buyer agent's commission 吗？
Listing is not on the MLS. Clearly the listing agent does not want to share commissions with the buyer agent. Even if we act as buyer agent for ourself, is that still legal for them to pay no commission to buyer agent?
Thanks for your input!