What is going on YouTube and our community? This is Matt Faircloth.
Welcome to our Mentorship Monday program. My co-host Justin Fraser. Come on in, Justin.
How's it going, Matt? I'm great, man. How are you? And Justin,
who we got today? Who's on Mentorship Monday? Oh, today, I got to bring on my man, Paul. Paul,
how are you today? Are you guys good?
Thanks for joining us today, Paul. Paul, tell us your Mentorship Monday question.
We'll see if Justin and I can help you out. I've been a basement apartment owner for 15 years.
I've owned three different houses with apartments, so that's about as far as I want to go, but I've
never really been happy with the leases that I've had. I've kind of got them from friends,
sometimes I got them from eviction attorneys. They're a little bit too long for me. They'll be
12 or 15 pages and just a lot. So, I'm kind of wondering where you can get some good
documents, more than just a lease, different types of documents to going to use. And
just somebody that's not too sophisticated, where you can get that stuff pretty easily.
Absolutely. Okay, great point, because a good lease is something that's got ironclad,
that's got you protected, but more importantly, above everything is also legal, right? In
the state that you're in. I could give you my Pennsylvania lease, but there could be language
in there that's not legal in Utah or wherever it is you're landlording, so it's important to go
state-by-state for when you pick up leases. Here are a few places to go to get really good leases.
Let's say leasing document could be the rental application and all the way down in the list,
and pet fee addendums, and all that other stuff, right? So, here's a few ideas. I'll tell you what.
I'm going to go back and forth with Justin, okay? Justin, you ready? I'm going to name a place that
Paul can go, to get a lease and you're going to name one, then I'm going to name one, and
whoever has to say, "I don't know first." Loses, right? Okay. Are you game? Right.
Cool. Okay, cool. All right,
I'm going to go easy. I'm going to say you could go to a local real estate investor friend of yours
that you happen to know that owns in the state that you're in. That is a place that you could go
to, a local other investor. That's a good place to get a lease. Somebody who's got a reasonable size
of unit, somebody who has stuff similar to what you have, because the leases that an apartment
building operator may have might not be applicable or may have stuff in them that doesn't matter
for a single-family homeowner or more importantly, a single-family home lease might say things like,
"Mr. Tenant, you're supposed to cut the grass." Whereas the apartment building lease isn't going
to say that. So fellow landlords- I like the idea.
That's a great one. That is my first place.
That's not the best one, but that's a great one.
That's why I wanted to go first, so I could get the low-hanging fruit. There it is. All right,
what's the best one, Justin? What you got? The best one, I will say, is on BiggerPockets.
And BiggerPockets... You don't like it? No, I was going to go there. That was my ace
in the hole. Oh, man.
I did not think you would think of that. I'm a pro member, man. Listen,
I don't know, I don't get compensated at all by BiggerPockets for any of this, but listen,
when I went to get a lease, I bought Brandon Turner's Book on Managing Rental Property,
and in the back of that book, it's a nice, big, yellow book, and in the back,
there's 50 different addendums, right? The pet fee addendum, they have the lease,
they have all this. And when that book came out, there was a whole bunch of disclaimers saying,
"This is just a generic lease, it's not specific for your state." And so I had to take that and
still go to an attorney and say, "Hey, does this match our state?" And truth be told,
I kind of brushed it off and just used what I used, and that's fine, but now-
Lalalalala. Yeah. All my tenants have
moved on. We're all good. Now, what they have, which is great, they have state-by-state legal
documents on BiggerPockets. And so I think you just have to be a pro member to get it,
or if you're not a pro member, I think they charge you a 100 bucks or something like that.
For 390 bucks a year for BiggerPockets pro membership, you get access to all those leases
for every state in the union, they got it. Exactly.
That was going to be my second source. All right.
Great one, Justin. All right- What does it cost to be a pro member?
390 a year. 390?
Yeah. And between you and me, because I used to teach their webinars, so I happen to know this,
if you watch one of their webinars, they'll give you a coupon code discount
for a pro membership. So, they do webinars once a week. David Green teaches some,
Brandon Turner teaches some and that. So, sign up for a webinar, you'll get
great couple of hour worth of education for free, and then as a thank you for being on that webinar,
they're going to give you a coupon code for upgrading to pro. And I think it's 20% off.
So its worth takes 70 bucks- That's a good deal.
Yeah. 70 bucks off and
you get an hour worth of free education too, so I'd do the webinar. And the webinars are live
too. So if you have questions, you can type, "Hey, Brandon, what did you mean when you said
da da da?" Absolutely, [inaudible 00:05:06] the webinar. Now, but I'm not done yet, Justin-
No, I get it. In the spirit of let's say that Paul doesn't want to pay for BiggerPockets,
or doesn't like Brandon's lease, or whatever. Doesn't have real estate other buddies and doesn't
want to pay the 390 bucks for BiggerPockets. Sure, you've got other option.
Justin, I got one more, the National Association of Realtors and the real estate professionals.
Any realtor in your state will have a Utah Association of Realtors, a lease contract,
and I'd be willing to bet 10 cents. Those are the leases. The bigger pockets are using too, shhh.
Actually, I don't know if it's the case or not. Don't say, " I don't know." I don't know. You know
what, I don't know that, but I know those are very easy to get. And so, if I were BiggerPockets that
I was to go give a bunch of leases to people that have been vetted by attorneys already, and I've
already that I know were already legit. I'd go get the national spreadsheet [crosstalk 00:06:04]
I think they... Because I'll say this the reason I don't think that is because when
I got that original version that was like in the book printed. And then later on,
when I went back and got the Jersey version, they were actually very close,
same sort of format. And it wasn't a totally different lease. It was they tweaked some words
here or there to make it or added an addendum that made sense for Jersey. So I do think that-
Okay. Anyway, that's besides the point,
but that [crosstalk 00:06:33]. Good idea. Good idea.
If I use the one from Brandon Turner's book, you're going to get a lot of troubles-
No. [crosstalk 00:06:35] Generic ones.
Here's the thing. [crosstalk 00:06:38] He's got a disclaimer in the book. There's a disclaimer there
that says, wait, it might say something I'm giving you this to you for educational purposes only.
And if you... But BiggerPockets is going to give you a Utah based lease for pro membership. But I
would say contact the local real estate agent and say, "Hey, I'll bet you that you've got yourself,
a Utah association of realtors lease contract." Okay. I'll give that one a shot too.
What's that? Yes.
I'll give that one a shot too. Okay. All right. That's mine,
Justin. Back to you. What do you got? All right. When you bought your house,
you might've used a real estate attorney, or if you're a landlord, you might have an eviction
attorney or someone that you might be able- Good point.
...To call. Your attorney probably has a lease or a very good lead on a lease
that they can use or defend against in Utah. No, he got one already from an eviction attorney,
which I'm not surprised that eviction attorney dropped the nine-inch lease on you or something
like that, that was too big. I like the simpler one, if-
Sounds like something the attorney would do. Okay. I got another one.
[crosstalk 00:07:47] But do you think as someone is realistic or their unrealistic?
With that? You think a five or
six page lease is realistic or is that-? Yes. That's it. It shouldn't be more than
that. Because I'll tell you, you roll in front of a judge with a 30-page lease on
a residential contract. They're going to throw your lease out of the court. They're going to be,
this is ridiculous. You can't expect a layman's person that doesn't know real estate to sign a
30-page contract. A lease should be four to six pages, I think.
Oh, perfect. That's what I'm looking for. Okay. Yeah. I think that's right. Anything shorter as
well is not going to cover- You want what's called a plain
language lease. That's what it's called. And it is these as a legal term for something that's not
legal terms, right. Now, I got one for you. Justin, thought I was dry. I'm not, Justin you
better have another one in your pocket because I got more. Here's another place you can go.
Your local Real Estate Association, your local REA, because what town you live,
Warren? You live in Utah, right? Well, between Salt Lake and Provo.
Okay. Salt Lake, I'm sure, has a RE Association. Provo is a growing real estate community,
is a growing community. I know people that are doing real estate deals in Provo. So
like Neil Bob was doing some stuff in Provo. So I bet there's real estate that REA groups
in both of those areas. I would contact or join or go to whatever those RE Associations
and reach out to the head of that REA. And I'll bet you that they even... They either have a lease
package that they will sell you, or there'll be nice and just give you their lease too. And
that it kind is correlated to my other, go to other landlord buddies. But those are organized
landlord groups you might not be affiliated with now. So I would go to them and ask them
for a copy of all their lease documents. And by the way, you and I keep saying the lease,
but those organizations will only give you a long list of lease documents. All right,
Justin, Pow, back at you. What do you got? All right. I mean I got one I don't love. We're
getting lower on list [crosstalk 00:09:51] Is Justin scraping? His scraping the bottom
of the barrel, man. I'm not sure if I got another one in my pocket or not.
All right. So you could go to a website like LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer and get a lease.
They will send you a lease for, I think it's... You can make a free account. I'm not sure exactly.
I've seen ads for like 19 bucks a month or something. So you go, you make your
monthly account, you download the lease, and you cancel your account,
and then you've got the lease. I'd be, one, I'd be concerned about,
how pertinent is it to Utah itself? And two, it's something that you just downloaded offline. So
I would want to vet it and make sure that you're comfortable with it. I think all the
other options, something that other landlords are using or the real estate agents with a group
are using are all really great ideas because you know that someone is using it, and chances are,
it's been tested by an eviction attorney. So that's probably my least favorite option, but
in the spirit of trying to not let Matt win, that is something I had to come up with.
It's a good one. Here's where I'm at, Justin. I'm going to call it a tie because I was
going to start scrapping and repeating myself too and everything like that. So,
but I throw out a few other ones that are probably was going to reach to. That word is good,
but I wanted to start throwing out bad advice just to beat Justin, which I wouldn't stoop so low,
but, I'd love to beat Justin, but I don't want to give you bad advice to do it.
Very good. So few more ideas that are pretty good,
but not the best. Call local property manager. They're going to be, screw you, why don't you
just hire my company? But if they're willing to give you the lease, that then you could do
that [Crosstalk 00:11:24]. But you only got three units you could probably keep that going yourself,
[crosstalk 00:11:26] a PM. But a local PM may be willing to share their lease with you. I doubt
that they would, but they may be willing to do that. And that's another one that I was going
to throw out as a possibility as well. But those are some good ideas. And the other one was, I was
going to say, was go to state of Utah's Housing Authority. Every... There is a housing authority
website out there. Even the section 8 office may have a lease copy that section 8 automatic... Not
that you're leasing the section 8, but any lease it's okay for section 8. It's also going to be
okay and legal in the state too. Yeah.
Sure. So tons of good ideas,
Paul. Great think, man. I think it was a tie.
I thought I was [inaudible 00:12:06]. I don't like you now. It's a little healthy competition does
always helps everybody. Right? Yeah.
So, well, good stuff, Paul, thank you. And that, so we appreciate you being on the show,
man. I did... we had to have given you enough here, right? That's you,
you've got all these different ideas. Your head must be spinning now, right?
Yeah. I watched a lot of your stuff though on YouTube, I appreciate it.
You're welcome. That's great.
Even if- You're welcome.
Even if it's from New Jersey. I know, it's New Jersey, Pennsylvania advice.
Thank you again, guys. Appreciate it. [crosstalk 00:12:40] Thank you for joining
us on Mentorship Monday, ma'am. Good Mentorship Monday, man. We had some good ones lately.