Q: When do I get the security deposit back? Do you take any charges out of it?

A: The only times we are forced to take funds from the deposit are when the utility overage is high above the amount we allow and have determined to be our tenants’ average. We tell everyone, ‘just treat it like it’s your own apartment’. Shut the lights off when you leave, don’t leave the A/C on 24/7 and shut it off when you leave, be careful not to muddy the carpet so we don’t have to steam clean it etc. In addition to our cleaning crew knowing exactly which possible damages are already there (small scratches here or there), please let us know using the 2^nd page of the lease, which items are missing or broken and we will be happy to replace them free of charge.

Q: How big is the room? Is it sharable? 

A: Yes it is. We have had 2-3 people staying comfortably in our units before. The solution is usually just picking up a $20 air mattress from any of the large stores around this area.

Q: Does it have Wi-Fi?

A: Yes, we provide all our tenants with High Speed Wireless Internet.

Q: Where is the laundry?

A: I haven’t ever seen a one bedroom apartment in this city with a washer and dryer inside, so most communal laundry machines have them either on the same floor or simply on the ground floor.

Q: Is the parking secure?

A: Yes, it is secured, covered and underneath all our buildings.

Q: Is there a Doorman? What about personal security?

A: There are no doormen as there are in New York City, however all of our buildings subscribe to 24 hour patrols and some even have a permanent presence after the management team leaves for the day.

Spencer Fine – www.FurnApt.com

7 Most commonly asked questions we get as a Furnished Apartment Provider: was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

LA is so Relaxed, Carmegeddon Was a Big Deal was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

Stability In the Housing Market was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

• Is the price guaranteed? -Always get this in writing. When people are pressed for time, the chance of spotting something irregular or misleading is decreased dramatically.
• Would the price drop if I were to book for a longer time frame? This is a good question to ask during those off season times when it is mutually advantageous to both parties to encourage longer term stays.
• Are there extra fees for utilities or are they included? Small print can be deceiving.
• How about that high speed Wi-fi? Is it actually fast?
  
• Is the phone service for limited local calling or am I charged for long distance? This question people never ask but I know of companies with disreputable practices and this is one of those that can snag a person unwittingly.
• Can the phone receive calls from another country without a problem? VERY IMPORTANT for our European friends.
• Is the TV service the bare minimum or are premium channels included? For those vacationing, you’re going to rack up some TV time, so why not enjoy it?
• What about Pay Per View? Sports fanatics have asked about this before, so if you have any deep seated fan roots and need to watch every game, make sure you don’t miss out.
• Is the Parking included? It should be. In high trafficked areas, parking is a premium and it’s not getting better.
• How many spots do I get and can I pay for an extra spot? Tandem spots may be arranged if the company can provide them and it’s definitely worth it to ask if there is a second car.
  
• Is this underground or covered parking? This is not as important as it is in cold climate areas. In cities with a hard winter approaching, you’d better believe this is a must.

11 Questions to Ask When Renting a Furnished Apartment was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

Miracle Mile in a Nutshell was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

Corporate Apartments are the same exact apartment and type of tenant you are leasing to now. One difference is I am the tenant and our tenant is a tenant. You meet him, we check him out thoroughly, and I sign a one year lease. He stays the time his corporation allows, which is up to 6 months.
Corporate Apartments are a multibillion dollar industry operated worldwide by Bridge Street, Oakwood, Equity Investments, and locally by Park La Brea, The Palazzo, Residence Inn, and Marriott. It solves an old problem for owners and a new one for corporations. You get the 1+ year lessee; a consistently on time rent check, and a tenant who will thoroughly and spotlessly clean your apartment every 4 to 6 months, including carpet. The corporations get a cheaper bill than a hotel, and their employees are happier.
It is a long term solution to the ups and downs of vacancies, bad seasons or down markets. This is a solution where you won’t have to chase tenants for rent checks, and a solution to annoying questions that tenants ask at move-ins, move-outs and odd times of the night. It is a mini-management system that costs nothing and saves management time and money. You also get a professional, quiet tenant.
Our goal for you is to create additional income, shorten your turnover time, and make management easier. This business stabilizes the up and down vacancy that market owners have had to experience in the past. There is a constant demand for your apartment by corporations who do not know you exist, yet.
Who becomes your new tenant…?
Fortune 500 Companies who have on payroll a new generation of traveling, hired problem solvers, sales executives, regional managerial help for law firms, accounting firms, engineering projects, writers, editors, movie production companies and hospital staff including nurses, young residents, trainees.
Some of the apartments in the past were filled with RNs, LPNs and Resident Doctors from Core Medical, Cedars Sinai, USC Hospital and World Health. The entertainment industry has pre and post production employees from Universal, CBS, BET, Elite Modeling, Warner Bros, BBC, Tele-Mundo, CBS and Warner Bros.
The legal industry has lawyers on assignment from Dunn and Kutcher, Japan Legal Assoc. and numerous smaller firms.
The stay is an average of 4 to 6 months, and many are longer. We remain on the lease for as long as you will have us.
These travelers are home owners who work most of the year on the road in different cities. They are not on vacation. They are on job assignments from home offices in Texas, NY, London, Brussels, Tokyo or Missouri. Some, of course not many, are in marriage transition, remodeling homes, relocating; or have sold homes.
They all share one thing in common; they do not want to live in a hotel as a guest or with friends.
Tenants make a minimum of $60,000 – $150,000, are college educated, work driven travelers, who want to do their job and have a quiet, fully furnished place to stay in a nice neighborhood.
How you benefit…
1. Our company will sign a lease for a year or more. All corporate prospective tenants’ applications are taken and checked out to see that they have AAA credit and no UDs. The tenant agrees to your lease, signs all lead notice forms, rules and regulations.
2. You have 100% control. We have yet to evict a tenant. If you do not like a tenant, we serve him; we pay the legal fees and pay rent during and after the process.
3. Our firm has a 4 million dollar liability and property damage policy, good credit, pays rent on time and throughout the lease period.
4. We are 10 minutes away from your location for fast response.
5. Furniture is brought in disassembled in boxes causing no damage, and remains with the apartment throughout our lease period.
6. You gain a AAA credit tenant-me, and a AAA quiet professional resident-them.
7. We absorb the downtime for turnovers, advertising, showing the apartment; manage keys and move-ins and outs.
8. You still maintain full control and a full building with earlier than the 1st of the month rent checks.
9. We take no commissions
10. We take care of re-rentals
11. We take care of any tenant problems that come up and pride ourselves on being professional and useful to management companies we serve.
Let me know when we can get started.
Sholom and Debbie Fine
Pillsbury Dayton was formed in 1999, after 30 years in the traditional residential commercial fields of Real Estate.
Our company is a member of AGLA, Apartment Owners Association and CHAPA. We are domiciled in Los Angeles, with associates worldwide. Past certifications include IREM as a CPM, sales and brokers licenses in Minnesota and California. Sholom Fine has owned, operated and sold 2,000 units for Universal Properties in Beverly Hills and his own portfolio of 2,000 units in Minneapolis, MN.

Letter to Landlords was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

What is the most rewarding part of what you do?

Providing great relationships with the tenants is by far the most rewarding part of this biz. I love to hear positive feedback too. There’s nothing like answering the phone to: “I love the apartment, thanks!”

Okay so what’s the worst?

It doesn’t happen that often, but some tenants, upon move in, immediately need to warn the hazmat teams that this apartment will henceforth be referred to as ‘ground zero’ and will be treated as a dumping ground from the day they move in until vacancy. I mean, we have tenants that seem so sweet and at the same time leave wall to wall trash, but then we have the tenants that are bossy, yell at me, blame me for damages that they are clearly responsible for and then leave the apartment a mess, possibly to spite me? I don’t know. Most aren’t like that but we’ve had a few worst case scenarios.

The massive plumes of smoke that will hover in the atmosphere for days is enough to cause safety concerns because of obvious issues of visual impairment and the sediment that the volcano is spewing includes so many metals that it would play havoc on mechanical systems and sensor readings.

Where our industry is concerned, the fallout from volcanic ash is likely to severely hurt the airline industry and is costing a reported 200 million dollars a day but this will not cause a significant blow to the travel and housing markets.  I have a couple tenants who are stranded and were en route to us but we are rearranging the schedules around them and we will see them safely after this weekend is over. Global Economic Insight chief for UK and European Interests Howard Archer says “The overall impact should be very limited even if the problem persists for a day or more … ,” In other words, this disruption does not equate with the eradication of the dinosaurs, and it will be business as usual in another few days.

Why the Volcano Will Not Disrupt the Travel and Housing Industry was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

The temporary housing market is far from devastated despite widespread news coverage to the contrary. News sources today are projections of fear that have stifled many markets they “report” to. Yes, there are many markets that were hit hard and a lot of people directly related to those markets suffered. The real estate and stock market were primarily affected and to be quite blunt, gamblers lost their money. The banking institute teaches that our houses are untapped bank accounts that we can raid anytime we want. During bull markets, the stock market evokes images that money rains from the sky and that inexperienced stock holders will do just fine because every stock eventually goes up no matter what or that someone else is going to make you a lot of money.

We as an established business pre-economic downturn, made a few cut backs but were largely focused on how to react to the ebbs and flows of the people who might become our tenants. We tried to adjust to “the new market” but there wasn’t anything “new” to do or offer. We sweetened our offerings anyway but it did not make a bit of difference and our company and large corporations like Oakwood and Bridgestreet got hit hard. We are all growing again and the housing business is back after the long pause and it did hurt. I still believe we all hurt for the wrong reasons when people second guessed everything they did because of sensationalism. We observed all of this first hand. We watched other people’s fears affect our own and we feared for ourselves.

So what happened? People that borrowed against their house lost their houses. And people who borrowed from the gambling ‘house’ lost to the house. Remember that saying “the house always wins”? Well that house now owns your house, literally. Unemployed and largely unskilled laborers are fighting for jobs with migrant workers because it’s not that easy to get a job anymore. The college educated with nonviable degrees or declining fields of study and the poorly motivated college graduates are moving back home with their parents.

Many may not realize that a lot of these fields our young studied and prepared for were on the decline anyway. The publishing business, newspapers and print journalism are all being taken over by internet sources and computer programming/software engineering jobs have long been declining because of the huge supply of workers but limited demand as programming shifts elsewhere and new markets emerge overnight. The music industry and Hollywood has been in rapid decline for at least a decade because of illegal downloading and it will only get worse as these companies raise prices to make the few who do pay, pay for the ones who don’t.

It may be rough out there for many but there is plenty of money to made. The real issue that we have come across is that people are scared. When people retreat from fear it keeps them from putting themselves out there in the market and makes them cower. When everyone reflects fear, everyone panics, with good reason and bad. This is the real problem. The ‘uncertain’ times that we are in are just that, uncertain. People have the money to spend for needed services but are hesitant to do so. Housing has always a needed service with an 8% annual growth rate but when people are stuck at home wondering if this is the financial Armageddon, nobody leaves. People stop moving and traveling becomes stagnant. When your average risk on any business venture is multiplied by sensational yellow journalism aimed at earning a buck at your expense, it makes you think twice and then thrice.

This was the real problem to us and many in the hospitality business. Fear controlled our market. I’m hoping because we are back on top that we as a people have suffered, we learned, and we overcame.

How fear controlled our business and the media devastated our country was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments

Being new in the corporate housing biz in 2003 and having landlords actually rent to us back then before short term rentals were recognized and understood was a goldmine. Within one year we had 30 units in all three buildings during the 2nd great bull market of my lifetime. We took all of their vacancies immediately upon offering, and we always paid on time. They must have loved us as many landlords love us now because 90% of the physical damage to units comes from moving furniture in and out but with us, once we’re in, that’s all the moving we do and they now realize the caliber of our tenants.

Rents were ridiculously low in those 3 buildings. This was possibly due to mismanagement, a lack of caring, or a combination of the two. Once the neighboring buildings saw what we were doing and how much of an asset we were, they welcomed us with open arms when a year before had literally hung up on us no matter how many vacancies they had. We got our foot in the door and we started building our business across the street, down the street and up the street as well. I instituted a lower and separate tier to make up for the inadequacies of the initial buildings themselves –regardless of how nice they were inside with our furnishings. At the time, I figured we could give our tenants more of a choice with 2 price points.

During our expansion and dealing with other management companies, my parents started to realize just how poor the management was at the original 3 locations. The Russian couple had become completely reliant on our business but had not bent an inch since we had started with them. We were still paying for their repairs, we were fixing up their lobby, and we had to have our own handyman on call because they refused to fix the most basic things. Whatever poor management had been going on before ceased entirely when we picked up the slack, until we stopped that is. In the 4 years we had been with them, they were greeted in the hallway at every instance with an unreciprocated smile, and not even a ‘thank you’ for the years of presents at all the holidays. We had had enough. They had not. They continued to make my parents miserable about the most inconsequential things. So much so that when the housing bubble burst and I came on, we cut them loose, and I was happy to do it.

We lost a massive amount of money during the downturn of our economy. We went from 45 units to 14 and even had vacancies then. That was a year and a half ago. We completely eliminated the lower tier of apartments we had at that time and focused on quality and exclusivity. While we have built up in this market, we aren’t going away even though sometimes it’s a fight every step of the way. We are constantly exploring new opportunities, taking on new modern contemporary furniture and upgrading inventory like the 42” HDTV’s, Unlimited Nationwide Calling, all in beautiful buildings and of course all inclusive. We have learned a thing or 20 along the way but one of the things that we have never changed is that to be successful, your clients always come first, no matter what. Whatever nonsense was or is going on behind the scenes, we never let our tenants know it and we never let anyone see us sweat. We’re a small business that is here to stay and we’re not going anywhere.

How We Started our Small Furnished Apartment Company was originally published on LA Furnished Apartments