Rental Market:
What can I say, July has always been a challenging month. I knew going into the summer months that things were going to be rough, but until it actually occurs, I seem to forget how tough it is. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. First Rate Property Management turned over 68 units this month. This July also set an all-time record in LEASE BREAKS. In fact we had more lease breaks this July than we had in all of 2008. The two biggies are once again, “financial reasons” with a close 2nd being, “I bought a house”. On top of the lease breaks, we currently have over a dozen tenants who are nice enough not to just leave the keys on the counter and walk away, but instead, they are trying to do everything they can to break their lease by coming up with every excuse in the world. It’s just been a very disappointing month and I am just unhappy with the market and wondering when it is going to turn around. I just hope that things improve in the fall?

So far August seems to be following the trend. On the first, we received 23 notices to vacate. 30% of those notices were from tenants purchasing homes and 40% of the notices stated some kind of financial reason. Relocation for employment was #3.

First Rate Property Management finished the month of July with a vacancy rate of just under 5%, but the monthly average was just over 6% with a high of almost 7%. That still isn’t that bad, but the part that bothers me is the concessions and the discounted rents it is taking so that we don’t have extended vacancies. We have some units that are now renting for what we were getting 10 years ago. Meanwhile, the expenses have increased. OK, you get the point, I’m depressed.

Sales Market:
Please view my current listings. Prices continue to be very attractive. However, I believe that it is prudent to factor in lower rents and higher vacancies when projecting performance. That way if things turn around or our rental market doesn’t continue to decline, you’ll be even happier.

New Website:
This month we plan on sending out our new owner statements via the new site. If we have no issues, we’ll transfer the URL from the Boise-Rentals.com site to the FRPMrentals.com site. As of now, we are having to input listing information into both sites, which is time consuming, but also a cause of mistakes as the listing information changes. So we are very much looking forward to making the formal switch.

Audit:
I thought I would just let everyone know that we take all parts of our business very serious. We have a very thorough policy and procedure manual. We do daily backups both on-site and off-site. And we do internal financial audits each month, but we also hire outside consultants to do a thorough audit twice a year. Why? There are a number of reasons. #1, we control a lot of money and want to make sure that we account for every penny. #2 We need to make sure no one is making mistakes. And #3, we need to make sure no internal theft is occurring. I am happy to report this year’s mid-year report was very uneventful and all money is accounted for.