Author: Keegan McNamara

With beautiful weather, a crowd gathered, and a substantially sized bulldozer, McNamara Ventures and Agora Partners officially broke ground on their newest joint venture project. The development will be titled The Guild on 30th and will be located at the Northeast corner of Broadway & 30th Street in the Golden Hill neighborhood of San Diego. The development is a joint venture between McNamara Ventures and Agora Partners.

McNamara Ventures is a local real estate development firm focused on urban infill, Smart Growth developments. Agora Partners is a real estate development firm specializing in identifying and creating value-add opportunities in urban environments throughout Southern California. Howard Kozloff, pictured below with Keegan McNamara of McNamara Ventures, is Managing Partner of Agora Partners, based in Los Angeles.

Golden Hill

Located just South of the expansive Balboa Park in the City of San Diego, Golden Hill is a vibrant neighborhood that offers incredible views of Downtown, Coronado, and stunning sunsets over the Pacific Ocean. Offering walkable destinations such as restaurants, museums, hiking trails, and even the San Diego Zoo, it’s no wonder that the area is popular with artists, millennials, and urbanites. There is even an annual musical block party that celebrates the musicians in the area. The architecture in the neighborhood ranges from pre 1900s to Victorian, Craftsman, and farmhouses to everything in between. With the eclectic mix of buildings in the area, the infusion of a modern development with 21st century convenience will be a welcome option for tenants looking to move to the area.

Constrained Supply

For the supply constrained San Diego Market, new housing units available for sale can’t come a moment too soon. A booming economy, local building restrictions, and a lack of developable land have created one of the tightest housing markets in the country in Central San Diego. The Guild on 30th is designed to provide housing within the “missing middle” market in San Diego. The project is designed to provide well-designed new housing in a great location that has a price tag in line with median values.

Groundbreaking Ceremony

As groundbreaking commenced last week, several members of the McNamara Ventures team watched bulldozer operators knock down the tiny, decrepit building and using the crane arm to load the debris into a waiting dumpster. “We are enormously excited to embark on this new project here in Golden Hill,” said Keegan McNamara from McNamara Ventures, “It’s a wonderful neighborhood, and we look forward to enriching it with The Guild on 30th.”

San Diego Experts

McNamara Ventures is a local real estate development firm focused on urban infill, Smart Growth developments. They focus on improving neighborhoods through thoughtful and sustainable design. They are supported by MV Properties, a property management team that provides quality location and management services that add value and convenience, with a thorough understanding of market conditions and client needs. If you’re looking to buy in the Golden Hill area, contact us today!

Today we are sharing the number one secret to maximizing your annual rental income. If you didn’t know there was a secret, pay attention to these numbers.

Vacancy Rates

The first number you need to know is 3 percent. That represents the countywide vacancy rate in San Diego County. This tells you that of all the apartments and rental homes in San Diego, only 3 percent of them are vacant at a given time.

Tenant Turnover

The next number you need to pay attention to is 7.7 percent. That’s the vacancy rate you will achieve if you follow standard operating procedure. When tenants give notice that they’re leaving, it’s usually around the first of the month so they can move into a new property and start another lease on the first of the following month. If you’re not proactive and ready to start the marketing and re-renting process right away, you’re going to lose a full month of rent. That 7.7 percent number reflects a full vacant month. This puts you at more than twice the local vacancy rate. It means you are 4.7 percent over what the vacancy rate reflects.

If it’s vacant for 1.5 months, that’s lost revenue of 12.5% — that’s 4 times the County average!

The Secret

The secret that we implement here is to end our leases on the 15th of the month. Even if someone signs on the first, they sign a lease for the period of 12.5 months. That way the lease ends on the 15th and we can move someone in before the start of the next month – when most people who are looking to move need to be in a new apartment.

We also work fast. When a tenant gives notice, we’ll go in and check the property’s condition. If the tenant allows it, we’ll start showing the property right away. That way, on the day the tenant moves out we have carpet cleaners ready and painters prepared to touch up the walls. Repairs start right away and we can get a new tenant in with a new lease right away.

With the whole county at a vacancy rate of 3 percent, we know a lot of people are looking for rentals. So if you’re not doing everything you can to minimize your own vacancy term, you’re losing that money forever – you can’t re-coup money from a vacant period!

Consider how it affects your investment income when you are 4.7 percent above average. If you rent a property for $2,000 a month, that’s a loss of $1,100, which is incurred just by not being proactive. Our goal is to keep our vacancy rate at around 1.9 percent. You can achieve this when you reduce your vacancy period to seven days or less. It means you are doing far better than average.

If you have any questions about how to reduce your vacancy and turnover time, please contact us at MV Properties, and we’d be happy to tell you more.

Our topic today is the unfortunate subject of how to deal with bad tenants and when to evict them. If you have owned rental property for a long time and you’ve never had to evict someone, consider yourself lucky. It’s something no one wants to do, but it is part of the business and you need to be prepared for it.

Things happen that can make eviction inevitable. Sometimes people lose their jobs or something happens in their financial lives and suddenly they can’t pay their rent. You may also elect to evict when you have a bad tenant in your property; someone who is disrespectful to the other tenants, isn’t following the requirements of the rental contract, or is disruptive to the complex or the neighborhood.

It’s important to be consistent with how you deal with tenants. When your tenants know that rent is due on the first of the month and they have a grace period to pay up until the fifth, you need to require payment by the fifth. If it’s not received on the fifth, we charge a late fee the next day. If there is no immediate response and the rent still isn’t caught up, it’s our practice to issue a Three Day Notice to Perform. This puts tenants on notice that if they don’t pay right away, the eviction process will start immediately.

You have to stay consistent because tenants respect it and respond to it. They won’t bend the rules if they know what the consequences will be. If someone we rent to isn’t able to pay, we wish them the best and we want to help, but our first priority is to protect your asset.

As professionals, we know how to deal with this but we don’t have to deal with it too often. That’s because we do a great job of screening tenants up front. That’s the best way to avoid evictions. However, when these situations do occur, we are ready to act.

Dealing with bad tenants is one great reason to hire a professional property management company. If you’re doing it yourself, one non-paying tenant should be enough to encourage you to reconsider. Contact us at MV Properties if you have any questions about eviction, or if you need some help with a bad tenant who is living in your rental property.

Many landlords and rental property owners wonder whether it’s better to hire a property manager or take care of the property on their own. Today, we are explaining why you it’s better for you and your investment to hire a professional property manager.

If you’re an investor and a property owner and you already have rental properties, you know how much work it can be. A professional manager can save you time and resources by finding the right tenants, screening those tenants, making sure everything possible is being done with advertising to ensure the listing is getting out to the widest possible pool of potential tenants and keeping track of market rents in your area and for your particular property type. That is a lot of work in itself.

If there is a unit that turns over, you need carpet cleaners, painters, and other contractors to make the place ready for the market again. Property managers work with the best professionals in the business and you can benefit from the savings that come from our relationships with those vendors.

When a unit turns over, we systematically line up all the repairs and start marketing the unit immediately. We are often able to minimize a vacancy period to a matter of days, whereas most DIY owners/landlords take at least a month to fill a vacancy. Think about that: 1.5 months vacant / 12 months per year equates to lost revenue of 12.5% – that’s less than our management fees! Just by minimizing vacancy periods, our services more than pay for themselves.

The best part of having a property manager working on your behalf is that you get your time back. You don’t want to be called in the middle of the night or over the weekend for an emergency repair. If a hot water heater starts leaking or the air conditioning breaks down, your property manager will get that call and take care of the problem on your behalf. All you have to do is collect a rent check that we wire to you once a month. A good property manager will also provide a full financial statement, including invoices and receipts for every penny that’s been spent. Companies like ours are transparent and efficient. Your CPA will appreciate our reports!

Hiring a professional property manager will earn you extra income on your property. In the first year of operation, even after paying our management fee, our clients have seen their investment income go up an average of between 10 and 30 percent.

We always recommend that you use a professional company to manage your rental home. If you have any questions or you’d like to hear more about the services we provide, please contact us at MV Properties.

Today we are talking about how to determine the appropriate rent level for your investment property. It always starts with research.

Market Comparables

Any time a vacancy comes up, you need to look online to see what other properties are renting for. Check the comps in the immediate vicinity and the neighborhood. If you own a condo, check the units in that same building with the same floor plan as your unit. Compare the views of your unit with the other units. When you’re comparing different properties and their rental prices, look at the different levels of amenities. Think about what your property offers that competing properties might not.

Market Experience

Experience also helps you price your rental property correctly. At MV Properties, we manage rental homes all over San Diego County and in diverse submarkets. Rents are dramatically different in the beach communities, where prices are the highest in San Diego and among the highest in the entire country, as compared to areas inland. Downtown is a complex submarket, where a lot of new, luxurious buildings have recently been built or are under construction. These new buildings impact the supply side of the rental market, and conditions can vary, just from one building to the next. In the core or mid-city neighborhoods, different factors will affect how much a studio, one bedroom or two bedrooms will rent for. The key is keeping up on these latest trends.

Pricing Philosophy

San Diego County is one of the tightest rental markets in the country. Countywide, our vacancy rate is at three percent. Historically, rents go up an average of five percent per year, and recently it has been even higher. So depending on your philosophy as an owner, you have options when it comes to setting a price on your property. If you want to be at the head of the market, follow those trends and raise your rent accordingly. If you prefer to have long term stable tenants and you don’t need to be at the top of where rents are, that requires a different approach when it comes to pricing your rental home.

Whatever your philosophy is, you need to keep up on trends. If you’re ready to hire a property manager to do that for you, please contact us at MV Properties, and we’d be happy to serve as your local property management solution.

MV Properties is a San Diego based property management and real estate brokerage firm, and today we are talking about why you should hire us. One thing you should know is that I’m a real estate developer and investor myself, so I know how important it is to choose the right property management company.

Experience

Our company was started in 2008 and we have been growing steadily each year. We manage properties not only throughout San Diego County but also in southern California as well. We can be available to help you no matter where your property is located.

Trained Staff

We keep up on all the latest trends in the property management industry. We also stay current on the new technology that’s available and all the best practices in advertising and screening. Our goal is to make our processes as efficient as possible. You’ll have access to a full staff of property managers and accountants who specifically focus on the tasks that maximize your investment return.

Detailed Accounting

Each dollar is accounted for and spent efficiently. Your statements at the end of every month show where your money was spent and why. You will always receive copies of invoices and receipts, and you’ll have a detailed statement that you can give your CPA at the end of the year when your taxes are filed.

Full Service Management

You don’t have to do anything when you work with us because we do it all for you. We handle everything from the tenant screening and placement to taking care of the repairs. If the tenants call in the middle of the night, it’s our phone that’s ringing, not yours. We take care of problems immediately.

Legal Compliance

Most importantly, we keep up on the latest laws in the industry. It’s very important to monitor these changes. In just the last few months, we have been at continuing education classes for the latest information in landlord tenant law. These laws are always changing and you’re asking for trouble if you’re not up to date. We also attend Fair Housing seminars and training. You may not think you’d ever discriminate but you would be surprised at the things that are done in the normal course of business that can be considered discrimination.

We even take classes on things as obscure as hoarding. If you have a hoarder in one of your apartments, like you see on the television show, it can be very hard to get them out of the property and to fix the situation.

These are just a few reasons why we should be your number one choice in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties. If you have any questions, or you’d like to hear more about us, please contact us at MV Properties.