Rental Housing Journal On-Site
September 2015 – Vol. 9 Issue 9
3. Budgets: Don’t Miss the Opportunities to Evaluate Employees and Vendors 7. Property Mangers Prepare for More Renters and Fewer Vacancies 8. Reasonable Accomodation/ Modification Policies for Market Rate Tenancies
9. Ask the Secret Shopper
14.Seattle Apartment Research Report
11.How To Implement a Smoke-Free Policy - WMFHA
20. Low-Value Homes Leading the Climb Out Negative Equity
13.Renting Less Affordable Than Ever Before, While Mortgages Remain Affordable
24. Dear Maintenance Men
PORTLAND/VANCOUVER
www.rentalhousingjournal.com • Professional Publishing, Inc
Published in association with: METRO Multi-Family Housing Association; Rental Housing Association of Oregon; IREM & Clark County Association
Vacancies Drop to 3.8% in Pierce-KitsapThurston
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eattle - Apartment Insights 2nd quarter results show vacancies falling from 4.37% to 3.79%. Rents surged 3.3% according to Tom Cain of Apartment Insights. The data are from his Seattle firm’s statistics and trends on 50+ unit properties in Pierce, Kitsap and Thurston counties.
Vacancy: 3.79 % The market vacancy for our nonrandom survey of conventional, stabilized 50+ unit properties in all three counties is 3.79%, down from 4.37% in the first quarter. The vacancy rate was 4.81% a year ago. This is the lowest vacancy rate for the three-county area since we added Pierce in 2007 and Kitsap and Thurston in 2009. The rate for all properties including those in lease-up is 4.38%, an improvement from last quarter’s 5.04%.
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Creating an Annual Operating Budget for Your Multifamily Property property whether you manage it yourself or if a professional third party management company manages it for you. Important: Do not prepare an annual operating budget for your multifamily property or apartment building and then file it away and ignore it. This article will give you some great ideas for using a budget to your advantage. by Theresa Bradley-Banta A multifamily real estate annual operating budget allows you to compare the actual financial performance of your property to your long-range projections for future income and expenses. It’s important to prepare an annual income and expense forecast for your
Benefits of Creating an Annual Multifamily Investment Property Budget A budget allows you to establish or identify: • Performance targets.
• Income and expense projections based on market drivers and assumptions. • Capital improvements planning and projections. • Problems that need to be resolved. Importantly, a budget can help you maximize profitability and avoid unforeseen major repairs and expenses.
Third Party Property Manager Performance Baseline The best use of a property budget is to track how your manager is performing.
• A baseline for property management reviews.
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Budgeting and the Beginner’s Mind By John Wilhoit Jr.
The over-simplified budgeting process: take last year’s budget, compare it with actual, split the differences and add 3% to revenue categories and 2% to expense categories. Done. Next! So much for thoughtfulness, professionalism or being connected to reality. Budgeting can be a “value add” proposition, assistteve Jobs had an affinity for Zen. ed by the beginners mind perspective. One of the concepts he deployed in In Any Circumstance there are Many business from this perspective was Possibilities “the beginners mind”. In its most basic Annual budgeting must take into form “the beginners mind” allows us to account the realities of each asset; the believe that in any circumstance there are physical asset and its market. A picture many possibilities. Interesting. Can we perfect asset with 300 newly built units apply this to the annual budgeting pro- across the street in a market with slow cess for our assets? absorption has to factor in the impact
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of the new competition. These factors should be reflected in the budget. Tony Golsby-Smith wrote a blog for Harvard Business Review entitled “Is Your Budgeting Process Killing Your Strategy” (http://blogs.hbr.org/ cs/2011/01/is_your_budgeting _process_kill.html). This thought shines an entirely different light on the budgeting process. While it is important to work through the minutia of asset-specific budgeting, this process must also take into account effects on the larger organization. How do we accomplish this? With
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