I love animals. I have almost always had at least one pet in my home. Pets enrich our lives and provide unmatched companionship and unconditional love. Except for my cat, whose affection seems to depend on my filling his bowl—and, even then, often includes the use of...
Jim Cirigliano
Umbrella Insurance for Rental Properties: What Landlords Need to Know
I have a theory that nobody likes insurance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important and often required by law or by lenders. But insurance is just so psychologically unsatisfying. I don’t know anyone who’s really excited to get their sweet new coverage. At best it gives...
6 Ways to Find Expired Real Estate Listings
In hot real estate markets, many properties listed for sale receive offers within hours or days of listing. When my wife and I were house hunting in 2022, we constantly watched for new listings on Zillow and scheduled tours as quickly as we could, only to see most of...
Are There Free Skip Tracing Tools for Real Estate? Free & Paid Tools Compared
What is a skip tracer? It sounds like some kind of cool, futuristic sci-fi job — like a cyberpunk private eye who tracks people down through a network of intergalactic wormholes. And in a way, that’s exactly what it is, minus the cyberpunk theme and the part about...
Can You Use a Business Loan to Buy Rental Properties?
When you need financing to buy a home, you look for a home loan. When you need financing for a small business, you might look for a business loan. But what if you’re in the business of buying rental property—like, say, a real estate investor? Of course you can...
How to Transfer a Rental Property to an LLC
If you’re new to real estate investing—and especially as you grow your portfolio of rental properties—sooner or later you’ll be faced with a choice about how to structure your business. As an individual you can own a rental property and operate the real estate...
Rent Incentives on the Rise: 9 Ideas That Won’t Break the Bank
It’s hard to make sense of the real estate market right now. The rising interest rates that began in 2022 have made mortgages more expensive. And yet home prices in most markets continued to rise, and rents along with them, as demand for homes remained strong into...
Cost Segregation Study: How to Take Accelerated Depreciation on Rental Properties
News flash for property owners: things break. That new roof you’re putting on your rental property? It might keep the elements out now, but give it a couple decades and you’ll need a new one. That’s why real estate investors can deduct depreciation — the decrease in...
Tax-Sheltered Real Estate Accounts: Make Your Kids Rich by 18
Billionaire investing mogul Warren Buffett once quipped that he wanted to pass on to his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” Another gem from the Oracle of Omaha. We all want to help our...
Non-Qualifying Mortgages: Uses & List of Non-QM Lenders
Traditional mortgage loans work great for those living a traditional lifestyle: working a job with a steady income and looking to buy a home to live in. But real estate investors — and many others, such as self-employed entrepreneurs and gig workers — may sometimes...