How is the Rental Market in Arizona?: How to price your rental ...

Payam Raouf
President/Designated Broker
Arizona Property Management & Investments

Hello everyone. I do not want to be repetitive, please read the? post below (Investor home-buying update for metro Phoenix) to better understand the rental market condition in Phoenix Metropolitan Area.?

Institutional investors have dominated the market competing against each other renting their homes. If you own one or several renal properties you must be aware of the changes in the renal market to market your home right or it sits there for months without a tenant.

We manage homes for several institutional investors. A) their homes are rent ready, completely renovated. B) they require less initial deposits C) they rent it up to 20% below the current market rent. D) their standards to lease are a lot easier than most landlords. E) they are very generous when it comes to paying a commission to agents to rent their homes quickly, they pay the first month's rent or at least 75% of the gross rent amount.

Fannie Mae and several other institutional investors go as far as keeping the current tenants in place with very favorable terms and no deposits!

What should you do? Can you afford keeping your house on the market for months paying your mortgage or not having any income? Most insurance companies cancel your insurance if your house sits empty after 30 days and so on.

Here are a few solutions:?

YOU WILL BE BETTER OFF TO SELL YOU HOUSE IF YOU CAN NOT AFFORD DOING THE FOLLOWINGS:

A) Make sure your house is rent ready. Today's tenants have too many choices. The fact that a few years back they were desperate and they had to hurry getting out of their home to rent yours is gone. Aside from Paint, Flooring, Appliances,? how does your front and back yard look? Would you live in it??

B) Landlords use to require an initial security deposit equal to the first months rent plus a cleaning deposit. EX: If the rent was a $1000, SD was $1000 plus a $300 cleaning deposit. In most cases those days are gone. We recommend that initially you ask for less deposits on approved credit. Of course, after reviewing the tenant's application, you can adjust it to what makes more sense. In some cases you can ask up to 1 1/2 times of the rent amount if required.

C) Just because the prices have skyrocketed doesn't mean the rent have accordingly. Price you home right. The formula is rent equals to 7% to 8% of your today's market value. So if you bought your house a few years back for $110,000 and it rented it for $1100 and now it is worth $150,000, rent should be $1150 and not $1500.

D) A lot of tenants are re qualifying to buy homes these days. They are moving out. Who is moving in? the ones that have to wait a couple more years longer or so. So, they still have some credit issues. Some tenants are getting new jobs, some are moving in out of state, thanks to the economy improving in Arizona, However, we see a lot of government assisted tenants entering the market called section 8. It is a hit and miss thing with section 8 tenants but the rent is guaranteed. I would consider renting to them if you want to rent your house quicker. They still have to go through the same screening process and pay the deposits except they either get the whole rent or a good portion of it subsidized by the government.?

On the other note, we are seeing a lot of owners that their homes are paid off offering to carry the note back themselves with a reasonable down payment and around 7.5% interest rate, amortized over 30 years, due in 3 to the tenants who can qualify to refinance it in 3 years or so washing their hands off all the expenses related to home maintenance, insurance, hoa fees and taxes, coming ahead on the game.?

Consider lease with option to buy. 3 year lease with an option to buy, some of the expenses such as the normal maintenance fees such as landscaping and pool maintenance is passed on to the tenant, you receive a decent upfront deposit and worry less about the turn over and increase your bottom line.

Consider longer term leases at a reduced rent. If the rent is $1200 for 1 year reduce it to $1150 for two and $1100 for 3 year lease.?

Is your house pet friendly? Instead of collecting a large pet deposit up front, charge a monthly pet fee and add it to the rent. You increase your bottom line and making it easier to rent. You need to look at your insurance policy to see what breed of pets are excluded. Even in such cases, you maybe able to ask the tenants to get an additional pet insurance up to $100,000 coverage. If they really love their pet, they do.

Lower the rent but ask the tenant to pay for the pool service or the gardening or even the HOA fees in addition to the rent or exclude some of the maintenance issues that are not health and safety related and are allowed by law and ask the tenant to pay for it such as fixing the reverse osmosis, garbage disposal,? routine pest control etc.

E) This is a deal maker folks. Hire a professional leasing agent and pay them all the money to rent it quickly the first time. Sales market is heating up. It takes as much time and effort to lease a home to these fussy tenants as it takes to sell them one with as much or more paperwork. I know our leases are 32 pages long! The difference is they make $600 leasing and $6000 selling. What would you do if you were in their shoes?? Most leasing companies charge $695 to lease your home. Offer the agent an additional $300 to $500 incentive if they rent it within the first 30 days. See how quickly your house is rented!

The companies or agents that settle for less don't now how to market your house for rent so you risk the chances of leaving it abandoned for months and possibly vandalized in the process or keep getting notices and fines from your HOA or the city for grass over growing or trash left out etc.

Interview at least two leasing agents in the area. Tell them before you make a final decision you want them to write a complete marketing plan or a complete description of how they would be marketing your house on MLS or other sites. Once you pick the right agent, review the description, see if they left something out or if you want to add to it or fine tune it and send it to them.

Pictures are worth a thousand of words. Ask the agent to send you 30 marketing pictures. Choose 15 of them and if you do have some good pictures yourself go ahead send them to your agent as well.?

Ask your agent as part of the deal a) to send a link to all the marketing they do online, B)? they are to contact you twice a week preferably with a phone call or in an email,? to give you an update. If they don't call you, call them. If they do not answer, put it in the listing agreement that you have the option to cancel your listing if you are not 100% satisfied with their performance within 30 days from putting your house on the market.

DO NOT PUT YOUR HOUSE ON THE MARKET TILL YOU HAVE READ THE DESCRIPTION AND SEEN THE PICTURES. The first 10 days are crucial for renting your house. Otherwise it sits on line and counts days on the market that works against you. The longer you house shows on the market, the less showing, the longer it takes to rent.
?

The competition is very tight out there for homeowners to rent their homes.? The difference between you getting involved and not is crucial. THEN GET INVOLVED OR GET OUT OF THE GAME.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Treat your tenant the way you want to be treated if you were renting the house. A happy tenant takes care of your property better and stays longer reducing your overhead. They may even end up purchasing your home one day reducing most of the marketing and brokerage fees putting more money in your pocket at the end.

We are a full service Real Estate Company . We offer a broad spectrum of services including purchasing, sale, short sale, leasing and property management. You can contact me and I provide you with? a detailed market analysis for sale or rent of your property and give you an indept insight of what is going on in the market in your area.

Please fill out THIS FORM attention Payam Raouf, with your contact information, the address of your property and any questions you may have. I will contact you directly to answer all your questions.?

Thank you,?

Payam Raouf
President/Designated Broker
Arizona Property Management & Investments
CONTACT US

Street funds and other large well-funded investors continue to buy houses in metro Phoenix, even though the pace has slowed as sales prices have jumped.
Some of the early investors, who bought in 2009, have flipped the houses for a quick profit, but most of these buyers are holding on to the properties and turning them into long-term rentals.
David Bignoli, president of real estate data research firm Netvaluecentral Inc., recently completed a report on metro Phoenix?s biggest investors.
Currently, THR Phoenix, also known as Treehouse LLC, owns more than 6,000 houses in metro Phoenix. THR?s house purchases are funded by New York-based international investor Blackstone Group.
Since early 2012, Blackstone has been on a house-buying spree in Phoenix and other markets hit by the foreclosure crisis, including Atlanta, cities in Florida and California since early 2012.
Most of the big residential investors in metro Phoenix are buying in these other markets as well.
Scottsdale-based American Residential Properties ranks no. 2 for house ownership in the Valley with more than 2,700 houses. The firm was started by some former executives of Franchise Finance Corp.
Empire Residential owns almost 1,700 houses in the Phoenix-area. The Scottsdale-based investment group has been around for several years and is led by Richard Felker and Geoffrey Jacob.
The fourth-largest holder of houses in the region is Santa Monica, Calif.-based Colony Capital. The well-known investment group has set up a Scottsdale headquarters for its residential activity. Colony owns more than 1,600 metro Phoenix houses.
Most of these investors rent their houses out, and say they plan to hold them for the long-term and make money on stable rents.
A few plan to package rental houses into publicly traded real estate investment funds sold to other investors.
Another interesting fact to note about many of metro Phoenix?s biggest investors: about half of their houses are listed in property records as owner-occupied.
It will be telling to see what these investment numbers look like in six months. Will these investors stop purchasing metro Phoenix houses in the next six months because of rising prices? Or will some sell their houses in the area because of rising prices?

Source: http://azezrentals.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-price-your-rental-homes-these.html

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LinkedIn begins rolling out Facebook-like mentions feature

LinkedIn is now rolling out a new feature very similar to a feature already offered by Facebook. When you begin typing out a person?s name or a company?s name in your status update, a drop-down menu will pop up that will allow you to ?mention? the person or company you?re discussing. The other party will be notified about your mention in real-time, providing much more engaging conversations.

LinkedIn states that its starting to roll out the new feature to English-speaking users at first, however, it plans on rolling out the feature to its global members soon. You can also utilize the new ?mentions? feature in the comments section on your LinkedIn pages as well. You will be able to hold much more organized conversations with individuals in a community, enabling convenient one-on-one conversations.

This new rollout works seamlessly with Twitter as well, despite the two companies severing ties with each other back in July of 2012. If your Twitter account is linked with your LinkedIn account, the mentions in your status updates will transfer over to Twitter seamlessly. The mentions, while appaering as a full name on your LinkedIn status update, will change itself to the mentioned person?s Twitter username.

LinkedIn provides professionals with an easy way to connect to other professionals in their fields, as well as search for new and better jobs. Speaking of jobs, LinkedIn also rolled out a revamp to its jobs page back in February that made it even easier for people to find jobs relevant to their interests and work experience. LinkedIn says that ?there?s more to come?, but we should expect no less from a network whose members ?are some of the most engaged professionals online.?

[via LinkedIn]

Source: http://feeds.slashgear.com/~r/slashgear/~3/-76KGYHL870/

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Early-backer GameStick consoles delayed to June, dev units now shipping

Fancied PlayJams' GameStick Android gaming console enough to back it on Kickstarter earlier this year? The good news is that Dev units have been shipping to the roughly 600 who signed up, with the remaining ones set to head out within a week. The bad news? The early-backer versions are now set to arrive at doorsteps in late June instead of April because of high-demand, according to PlayJam. As its latest Kickstarter update details, the units will need stronger tooling than the silicon-based molds of the dev units to ensure that "tens of thousands" of them can be successfully made. Additionally, this will apparently force the company to ship these larger factory yields via sea transport rather than air, which also slows things down.

A case of success causing slowdowns it seems. Hopefully not much longer than these new estimates, too -- while this breakout underdog is set to hit retailers like GameStop, that other Android-based console, OUYA, is already shipping out to backers -- and its retail units are planned in June. You'll find the full update from PlayJam at the source link.

Filed under: Gaming

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Source: PlayJam (Kickstarter)

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Q9oLt2oojPA/

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Bare-breasted Tunisian feminist fears for her life

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) ? A 19-year-old Tunisian who bared her breasts and taunted Muslim hard-liners said this weekend that she now fears for her life and wants to take refuge abroad.

The woman known only as Amina appeared in photos on Facebook last month with the words "My body belongs to me" scrawled on her bare chest, a particularly bold act in a Muslim country led by a moderate Islamist party, Ennahda.

Amina's act was inspired by the Ukraine-based group Femen, which stages bare-breasted protests for women's and gay rights. The group held an International Topless Jihad day last Thursday in support of Muslim women, including Amina.

Amina went into hiding after reportedly receiving death threats, prompting wild rumors over her whereabouts, including that she had been interned in a psychiatric hospital. But she reappeared in an interview broadcast Saturday with the French cable TV station Canal Plus in a village hours from the Tunisian capital where she's been hiding.

She told Canal Plus that she "must leave Tunisia."

"I'm afraid for my life and the lives of my family," she said, adding that she doesn't think it possible to return to school in Tunisia and wants to study journalism abroad.

Amina made an earlier TV appearance with a private Tunisian channel, in mid-March, her face blurred. She insisted her action had not aimed to provoke. "We Femen, we have the courage to cry out our demands to liberate women," she said at the time.

Amina told Canal Plus that though she fears for her life in her homeland, she will keep her Femen principles "until I'm 80."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bare-breasted-tunisian-feminist-fears-her-life-140417582.html

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UK lawmakers call for ban on former bosses for HBOS failure

By Matt Scuffham

LONDON (Reuters) - Bailed-out British lender HBOS was so badly run it would have failed even without the 2008 financial crisis and the regulator should consider banning its former bosses from the industry, UK lawmakers said in a damning report.

The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, tasked with finding ways to reform UK banks, said HBOS was an "accident waiting to happen", with bad lending and losses across the business likely to have led to its insolvency even without the funding and liquidity problems of the financial crisis.

The committee said regulators bore some of the blame, but primary responsibility lay with Dennis Stevenson, chairman from the formation of HBOS in 2001 until its collapse, and former chief executives James Crosby and Andy Hornby.

There was a "colossal failure of senior management and the board", said Commission chairman Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative lawmaker who expressed surprise that only Peter Cummings, who was head of corporate lending at HBOS, had so far been punished.

"The Commission has asked the regulator to consider whether these individuals should be barred from undertaking any future role in the sector," Tyrie said in the report published on Friday.

Crosby was chief executive of HBOS between 2001 and 2006 before being succeeded by Hornby.

The trio earned millions during their time at the bank and in subsequent roles. Crosby was paid close to 8 million pounds during his tenure as HBOS's chief executive. Hornby was earning 1.9 million pounds a year before leaving the bank, while Stevenson's package was worth over 800,000 pounds a year.

Following the report, Crosby, 57, promptly resigned as an advisor to private equity firm Bridgepoint. He is also senior independent director at the world's biggest catering company, Compass , which declined to comment on whether he would keep his 125,000-pound-a-year position.

Cummings was fined 500,000 pounds ($759,000) by Britain's financial services regulator in September and banned for life from the industry.

HBOS, Britain's biggest mortgage lender, had to be rescued with a government-engineered takeover by rival Lloyds , which subsequently needed a 20-billion-pound bailout to survive.

Hornby, who since leaving HBOS, has worked as chief executive of healthcare group Alliance Boots, earning over 2 million pounds a year, and who currently runs betting shop chain Coral, declined to comment on the report.

Coral, however, had nothing but praise for Hornby, 46, and a spokesman said his position was safe.

"Coral is performing extremely well, and we are really pleased with the great job Andy is doing."

Stevenson, 67, who sits in the upper chamber of parliament, could not be reached for comment.

HBOS was created in 2001 by a merger between Halifax, a former mutually owned savings and loans firm, and the 300-year-old Bank of Scotland. It ramped up lending using cheap funding on the wholesale markets rather than safer customer deposits, and its high-risk strategy was exposed when that funding dried up following the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008.

HBOS's managers blamed the financial crisis for the collapse, but the Commission said the bank's business model was inherently flawed and its board was a "model of self-delusion".

"The sums would never have added up," Tyrie said.

"The Commission has estimated that, taken together, the losses incurred by the corporate, international and treasury divisions would have led to insolvency, regardless of funding and liquidity problems, had HBOS not been bailed out by both Lloyds and the taxpayer," he said.

The Commission said 25 billion pounds was lost on bad corporate loans, and there were losses of 15 billion at its international business and 7 billion at its treasury unit.

The report said the role played by Britain's financial regulator had been "thoroughly inadequate".

Britain's Finance Ministry said the failure of HBOS was a "symptom of the financial crisis and the regulatory system in place at that time". It said the introduction of a tighter regulatory regime would help prevent future failures.

The responsibilities of the FSA have been passed to two new bodies, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

($1 = 0.6607 British pounds)

(Editing by Will Waterman)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/lawmakers-urge-executive-bans-colossal-hbos-failure-101311926--finance.html

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Doctor killed in bombing targeting Afghan governor

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) ? A suicide bomber targeted a provincial governor's convoy Saturday near a hospital in southern Afghanistan, killing a doctor, officials said.

Gov. Mohammad Ashraf Nasery, who escaped the assassination attempt, said a car bomb exploded as his convoy was passing the hospital en route to an event at a nearby school in Qalat, the capital of Zabul province. He said the doctor was killed, and two of his bodyguards and a student from the school were wounded.

"I'm safe and healthy," he told The Associated Press in a telephone call. "The target was my vehicle, but I survived."

Zabul is located next to Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban, and shares a volatile border with Pakistan.

Provincial police chief Gen. Ghulam Sakhi Rooghlawanay said earlier that the attacker was a suicide bomber on foot who detonated his explosives as the governor was on his way to visit the hospital.

Taliban and other insurgents have stepped up attacks targeting Afghan officials in a bid to undermine confidence in President Hamid Karzai's government as U.S. and other foreign combat forces prepare to withdraw by the end of 2014.

The U.N. has expressed concern about the spike in targeted killings as the Afghan government works to assert control beyond its seat in Kabul.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/doctor-killed-bombing-targeting-afghan-governor-073914410.html

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Was Obama's 'best-looking attorney general' comment a sexist gaffe?

President Obama praised California Attorney General Kamala Harris for a lot of things. But one compliment raised hackles on the left.

Thursday morning, few people outside of California could even name the Golden State's attorney general. By the end of the day, everyone who reads Twitter and political blogs not only knew who Kamala Harris is, but also had an opinion about her looks. The question isn't whether California's Indian-Jamaican-American attorney general is attractive, but whether President Obama should have noted her beauty during a San Francisco Bay Area fundraiser.

Here's what Obama said, according to a White House transcript:

You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country ? Kamala Harris is here. (Applause.) It's true. Come on. (Laughter.) And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years. [via The Los Angeles Times]

The part about Harris being "the best-looking attorney general" didn't go over well on Twitter, or on many liberal blogs. Commenting on Harris' looks was "sexist (and stupid)," says Katie McDonough at Salon. And "if you're not sure why," McDonough explains using a bunch of outraged tweets. Jonathan Chait at New York picks up the thread, explaining why Obama needs "gender-sensitivity training":

For those who don't see the problem here, the degree to which women are judged by their appearance remains an important hurdle to gender equality in the workforce. Women have a hard time being judged purely on their merits. Discussing their appearance in the context of evaluating their job performance makes it worse.?It's not a compliment. And for a president who has become a cultural model for many of his supporters in so many other ways, the example he's setting here is disgraceful. [New York]

BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray took a very?BuzzFeed path of criticism, with a photo-heavy list of "the 13 hottest attorney generals" ? all white males. Not everyone on the left was so incensed by the comment, however. First of all, Obama "spoke the God's honest truth," says Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post. She truly is gorgeous.

SEE MORE: Is 'being yourself' enough to get into college?

What's also true is that Obama and Harris are longtime friends. She was a featured speaker at the Democratic Convention in Charlotte. And Harris was a guest at the state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron.... Judging by some of the comments I've seen on Twitter you'd swear the president was guilty of luridly cat-calling a woman he doesn't know. If I thought for one moment that's what was going on, you better believe I'd hammer him for it. But that's not the case here. Far from it. So lighten up, people. [Washington Post]

Hate to say this, but when I've introduced Kamala Harris I've basically said the same thing. jezebel.com/5993692/obama-?

? Ayelet Waldman (@ayeletw) April 5, 2013

Conservatives, meanwhile, mostly watched in amusement. "At the very least, this'll make for a nifty blue-on-blue food fight between hardcore O-bots and progressives who take their feminism a bit more seriously," says Hot Air's Allahpundit. If truth is "an absolute defense to gratuitous comments aimed at a woman colleague's appearance," Obama is probably "off the hook." But the politically correct crowd might have a point:

There's research out there that claims even mildly sexist talk aimed at a female politician can do disproportionate damage to her public image. Obama's comment is so mild and so tempered by praise for her intelligence that it might not even count ? the audience laughed, didn't they? ? but now that the most famous man in the world has made an issue of how she looks, so will everyone else who stumbles across this story. She'll be objectified by millions of people in the next day or two as they find out what he said and then Google her to render their own hot-or-not verdict. Who knows if that'll hurt her politically or no? [Hot Air]

Conservative Independent Women's Forum tells me they didn't have a problem with Obama's Kamala Harris remark: bit.ly/17fMADy

SEE MORE: Listening in to global nuclear exercises

? Pema Levy (@pemalevy) April 4, 2013

+1 RT @capehartj: #Obama was right about @kamalaharris.... wapo.st/Xgrhxy

? Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) April 4, 2013

"California, quite simply, has freakishly good-looking elected officials," and Harris and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) top the list, says Robin Abcarian at The Los Angeles Times. But that doesn't mean Obama gets a pass for "stating the obvious," especially after once calling a reporter "sweetie" ? a gaffe for which "Obama rightfully apologized" ? and his 2008 comment about Hillary Clinton being "likable enough." Was Obama's latest comment sexist?

SEE MORE: Today in history: April 5

More wolfish than sexist, I'd say.... But still. Let's not pretend that physical beauty is not a bonus in politics, particularly for women, who then walk a fine line between wanting to be found attractive and not wanting to be judged on looks. The Obamas have benefited immensely from their cool beauty. Likewise, the Romneys benefited from their classic good looks. The rewards of beauty, we all know, can be plentiful, especially when combined with superior brains and ambition. [Los Angeles Times]

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obamas-best-looking-attorney-general-sexist-gaffe-085000032.html

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