What Have You Learned The Hard Way In Regards To Optimizing Multi Family Investments?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

When investing in and optimizing multi-family investments, don’t underestimate the power of your resident composition pool. Finding quality residents that pay rent on time and don’t cause trouble will make or break the success of your investment. The more difficult the region of your investment property, the more difficult forming this resident composition pool may be. 

Richard Wilson: And what have you learned the hard way in regards to optimizing multi-family investments? 

Brian Burke: The composition of the pool of resident prospects is very very important. It’s easily underestimated how difficult it can be to manage a property with an undesirable resident profile. If you’re in a high crime area, it’s just very, very difficult – we’ve done this and we’ve struggled at properties where maybe the property itself wasn’t high crime, but the area surrounding it might be, and trying to attract good, qualified, non-criminal residents is very difficult and it’s a constant uphill battle. If you can have a good resident profile, that has good credit, pays their rent on time, multi-family investing is a lot easier. 

Richard: Right.