I am interested in renting a townhouse in UTC with a 2 car garage (to avoid the petty vandalism wave — so many cars with the window smashed to get at the radio). I found one in the area near the Whole Foods, and the person handling the showing of the property to me mentioned that he had convinced the owner to DROP the rent by $400/month (!)
I like that area because it’s so walkable to everyday stuff (groceries, banks, post office, movie theaters, fast food). I noticed other threads where people were mentioning rental drops and thought I’d add this datum to the mix.
Also, as another aspect of financial self-defence, I looked up the property on SDL and found what I believe the last purchase price of the property was. I then took the equations that I understood most RE investors use, and read the Pigg forums to figure out what good assumptions are to plug in to reverse engineer if I was getting a good deal on rent. Would you all mind letting me know if these are historically sane assumptions for the UTC area:
Gross Rent Multiplier — 10-12
Gross Operating Income — vacancies + mgmt cost=20%
Cap rate – 7-10% (isn’t this just the inverse of GRM?)
Monthly rent Multiplier — 125-150x
$/sqft = $1.50-$1.90/month
Or would it be better for me to use the Zillow current “predicted” purchase price to plug in, as opposed to the previous sales price (back before 2002)? Any other assumptions that are good?
I looked up the HOA, added property tax of 1.5% and likely insurance (called it $1500/yr) plus a likely management fee of 10% gross rent to calculate a net operating income deducted from gross rent. Any other major factors I missed? Using the previous sales price, I figure the LL is about breaking even.
Considering that I intend to take care of the property as well as my own, I believe that peace of mind is worth something to the owner (though they don’t know it yet — I once bundled all the tiny plumbing issues into one plumber’s visit so to save my current landlord the hourly cost, and after that the LL basically trusted us to call the plumber directly ourselves and charge LL’s account).
