The Bosshardt Blog

The Northside Shopping Center is Under New Management!

Bosshardt Property Management, Inc. has taken over the management of the Northside Shopping Center as of February 1st. The shopping center features Anchor tenants Winn Dixie, Big Lots and Harbor Freight. Other tenants include Lee's Nails, Gatorland Laundromat (more on this), Advance America, Jackson Hewitt, Dr. Becker, Sprint and Cox Communications.

Bosshardt was selected over other local firms because the previous international management company was unable to provide full scale service and lacked a local presence that is crucial in monitoring the day to day operations of a retail center.

It has been customary for regional firms to focus on the asset management side of things, and then sub contract out the property management to vendors who aren't property managers. When times were good, the ends justified the means and owners were happy because they got a nice net check. Now the checks are going the other way and everything is under the microscope.

The day before Bosshardt Property Management took over, Gatorland Laundromat's owner turned over the keys of a successful business. So currently we are working with Leasing Agent Bruce Rider on re letting that space and should be signing a lease on Monday. 

Other immediate projects are underway. The largest issue the center currently faces is releasing in part or whole the 38,000 square feet space that was previously occupied by Ashley Furniture.

Contact Bruce RIder for information regarding leasing at Bruce@ridercommercial.com and Aaron Bosshardt with questions regarding the management at Aaron@bosshardtpm.com

Despite what skeptics thinks, Property Managers are leading the green movement

One of the interesting topics at the 2009 NARPM national convention was energy efficiency and emissions. Most property managers have already adopted green practices both for themselves and for educating their clients, but the perception may not meet the reality. I recently asked a local area green expert and contract worker for the Department of Energy if a few of my owners could hire him to do some energy evaluations of their properties. He just about flat out refused! He even went so far as to say that he worked on a municipal committee and they all agreed that landlords would be too cheap to make green improvements. Two days later, my owner just went ahead and put in an $8000 Energy Star 15 Seer AC unit without an energy study on his building. If he had an energy study would he have considered other improvements? Absolutely.

Bosshardt Property Management recently asked our landlords if they would be interested in some type of green evaluation or measurement of their property. Most replies were that they were in fact interested, but had already made substantial improvements to their homes. The reality of the situation is that it's often up to the tenants to make decisions and lifestyle changes that reduce energy usage. "Property Managers have to green the planet, one tenant at a time," said Sina Sheku, activist and founder of Propertyware.

The truth is there are a lot of things we can do to educate our tenants on how slight changes might just make a big impact. For years, we have pushed tenants to change air filters monthly from a maintenance aspect, which can increase the lifespan of A/C units and decrease costs. We haven't ever really pushed it from the perspective of saving energy, which feels good and should put more money in our tenants pocketbooks. 

 

Pictured above is our complimentary tenant move in package. We've added a CFL light bulb to illustrate the point that reducing energy use can be easy, cheap, and fun for all of our tenants. In the very near future, we will have our properties categorized by their level of green improvements. "We are making improvements to both our tenant education and marketing efforts. This is really a two pronged effort from our owners and our tenants," said General Manager Ashley Morrell.

 

The Good News and Bad News about the Gainesville Rental Home Market

Posted by Aaron Bosshardt, COO, Bosshardt Realty, 09/10/2009

 

So let's start off with the good news. It was a great turn. We rented over ninety single family rental homes in two months. The seasonality of the rental market has returned and that should represent some type of stability in the real estate markets.

What I mean by that was this time last year, there was no slow down come mid-August as has been tradition in Gainesville for the past 20 years we have been managing properties.  Our owners, for the most part, were cooperative and realistic about what to expect. We really pushed the slogan "Rent or Die" starting in late May.

As you might expect, inventories were way up this year, and that created downward pressure on rents. At one part early in the season, I tweeted about driving down University Avenue and seeing 19 For Rent signs up. A lot of those old "Rules of Thumb" about 600 per bedroom left some owners with vacant prime campus properties this season.

Harvard does a great annual report on the housing market annually. The last five pages are dedicated to the rental market. It's a great report, and to steal from them a bit, there is a bright side in all of this. It's the perfect time for federal, state, and local [okay, I added the local part] governments to take a good look at their polices.

And as you can tell, we are getting into the bad news. There is no immediate relief in site. While rents are reported as down only 0.2 percent nationally this year, the quality and costs of rental product have increased dramatically.  Things like granite, upgraded appliances, wood floors, pools, hot tubs, and security systems have become more the rule than the exception when characterizing rental properties. 

The bottom line is that single family home rentals, which represent just under 40 percent of all rentals nationally, are suffering. In our area, taxes have yet to decline, and landlords shoulder a much larger share of the tax burden. Insurance costs have abated some, but a more pressing concern is the ability to insure rental property at all.

Locally, unemployment has almost doubled in the past 12 months, and the rental market, characterized by those more likely to lose their jobs, has seen this affect rents and eviction rates. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, one in five house in foreclosure are rental homes.

Locally and statewide, I hope that government can do better and take control of their budgets to help reduce what has become an unfair burden on property tax owners. They're must be many costly programs that provide no value or benefit. Renters aren't going to pay for these programs because they don't have to. At this point, there is a divergence in the free market system (what tenants will pay for) and the forced market (what property owners must pay for). What would be terrible is if the county starts cutting services that tenants and owners are willing to pay for, like fire services. The firefighters did a great letter to the editor about this.  

Well, in summary, don't let all this talk about how bad things are let you forget that owning investment property is the single best way to establish and build wealth. I don't know anybody who started with a little bit of money and made it big in the stock market, but I know wealthy investors who started with nothing but a dream and single family home purchase.