Speaker 1: Samantha (TurboTenant) 0:02 [Music] 0:06 Welcome to another Landlord Spotlight. My name is Samantha, and I’m on the Education and Community team here at TurboTenant. Joining me today is Rojan from California. Hi, thanks for joining us. 0:18 Yeah, thank you for having me. Really excited to be here, and I am a hardcore promoter of TurboTenant. So, really love what you guys are doing. 0:27 Awesome! We love a hype lady. It’s great. So, I’ve got a few questions for you about your landlord journey and your journey in real estate and how you’re using TurboTenant. Let’s just jump right in.
Speaker 2: Rojan (Landlord) 0:40 Yeah, sounds good. Awesome. So, how did you become a landlord? First off, can you tell me a little bit about how you got into landlording and your rental? 0:48 Yeah, sure. So, I have one rental property right now, and it’s actually my family’s property that I am just managing. My mom is an immigrant, and so am I. Real estate has always kind of been like, you know, come to America, buy real estate; it’s like the American dream. So, it’s been important definitely in our family. Luckily, in 2012, she was able to buy a condo. Then more recently, she wanted to just change it up a little and was able to buy her second property. We were kind of going back and forth, like should we keep the original condo, should we sell it, should we rent it out? We don’t really know how to rent it out. But obviously, it’s better to have more real estate in this country. So, we made the decision to keep the original condo, and I just started managing it. So that’s kind of my side hustle a little bit right now.
Speaker 1: Samantha (TurboTenant) 1:52 Landlording is your side hustle. What is your full-time career? 1:55 My full-time job is I work in Tech as a product marketing manager. I’ve always definitely had a passion for real estate, and I feel very lucky to be able to pursue it now and learn more about it because I think it’s a really fascinating industry.
Speaker 2: Rojan (Landlord) 2:15 Yeah, that’s a good question. I will say, again, like this was all very new to me. The only experience I really had was watching my boyfriend manage his properties. He has four of them, but he does use a property manager. And I kind of knew a little bit from the beginning, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing because it was just one rental, and it was very close to our house, and we also had lived there for 10 years. I wanted to take on the challenge and do it myself. I started Googling a lot and forums on Reddit or BiggerPockets about what are other people using because I knew people would manage properties themselves. I asked one of my co-workers at the time too. She said she just Venmos, like, she gets her rent through Venmo. But I kind of knew I wanted to do something more official just in case, you know, there were complications or you need to evict someone. I wanted to have a track record. Once I started searching, I somehow came across TurboTenant because somebody said that they had been using you guys for like seven years, and it was really easy to use. So, I looked into it, went on your website, and I was shocked that it was like free, basically, for the landlord. Because I thought it was going to be like $200 a month or something like that. But I really appreciated that it was so fast to sign up, and really, the UI makes it so easy to kind of follow along at the different stages of managing your rental, and it just takes you through the flow.
Speaker 1: Samantha (TurboTenant) 5:18 Awesome. So, you love The Landlord Portal, you’ve got the forms, we’re doing the screening, the marketing. Did you use the marketing and screening features?
Speaker 2: Rojan (Landlord) 5:28 Yeah, I definitely did. I would say I got most of my kind of hits through Facebook, though. But I would always direct people on my Facebook link to go and fill out the pre-screening form on TurboTenant. I think I remember it took me like a month and a half to find tenants, not because of the lack of interest, but just because I knew that I really wanted to not be iffy on the requirements that we had in place. You know, you need to make two and a half times the income, your credit needs to be above like I think we said 700-ish or 650 or something like that. So, that process just took a bit of time, like finding someone that met all of the requirements and was an effective communicator and seemed like, you know, stable in their career and everything like that.
Speaker 1: Samantha (TurboTenant) 7:54 Cool. Are there any other educational resources that you’ve used from TurboTenant outside of just The Landlord Portal for managing?
Speaker 2: Rojan (Landlord) 8:05 Yeah, that’s a good question. I will say, one anecdote before I even personally became a landlord was watching my boyfriend go through his landlord journey. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, when it first hit, one of his properties ended up becoming vacant. The tenant didn’t tell anyone that she was leaving, so a squatter actually came in almost for a whole year. And at that time, you couldn’t evict anybody. So, he was just losing a lot of money. Not knowing who was in his property, you know, and getting that person out was really difficult. Just watching him go through that made me extra cautious in my landlord journey, which is why I wanted to be really strict with the income requirements, with the credit check, with the background check. TurboTenant makes all of that stuff really easy for us to do, like in, I think, 30 seconds or one minute. You get their background check, which is crazy. But you see everything you really need to know about that person’s credit history, which gives you more confidence because, at the end of the day, especially with this property that me and my mom have, like, it was our home. It’s not just a random property that we bought somewhere. We wanted to make sure that the people that were in it would take care of it, would, you know, pay rent on time, and like, we wanted it to be their home as well.
Speaker 1: Samantha (TurboTenant) 9:53 So, since being a landlord, have you had any, outside of TurboTenant’s awesome education, have you had any learning opportunities over the course of your landlord experience?
Speaker 2: Rojan (Landlord) 11:44 Yeah, that’s a good question. I will say, again, like this was all very new to me. The only experience I really had was watching my boyfriend manage his properties. He has four of them, but he does use a property manager. And I kind of knew a little bit from the beginning, even though I didn’t really know what I was doing because it was just one rental, and it was very close to our house, and we also had lived there for 10 years. I wanted to take on the challenge and do it myself. I started Googling a lot and forums on Reddit or BiggerPockets about what are other people using because I knew people would manage properties themselves. I asked one of my co-workers at the time too. She said she just Venmos, like, she gets her rent through Venmo. But I kind of knew I wanted to do something more official just in case, you know, there were complications or you need to evict someone. I wanted to have a track record. Once I started searching, I somehow came across TurboTenant because somebody said that they had been using you guys for like seven years, and it was really easy to use. So, I looked into it, went on your website, and I was shocked that it was like free, basically, for the landlord. Because I thought it was going to be like $200 a month or something like that. But I really appreciated that it was so fast to sign up, and really, the UI makes it so easy to kind of follow along at the different stages of managing your rental, and it just takes you through the flow.
