Rental Property Due Diligence That Can Save Real Estate Investors Thousands

Greg Bowman (00:00)
But the homework really wasn’t done on that property. And so as we’re doing some renovations, we discover that the house has cloth wiring, which is okay. It can be okay.

But in the attic above the second floor was cloth wiring that was bare and it was laying across a galvanized pipe and it had energized a rat. The rat didn’t make it.

Q Edmonds (02:02)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds, and I’m excited to be here today. I have a fantastic guest whose expertise is in the world of property management. He’s a manager of residential properties.

Over 100 portfolios he manages. Name of the company is WaterMarke Management Group. And I am excited. Well, he’s part owner. And I’m excited. I’m excited because we get to look through his lens and just learn from his life experience. And you know, that’s what I say. That’s what it’s all about. We all can literally be doing the same thing, but we’re going to do it differently because we are differently. So we’re here to learn from each other. And so today.

We’re here to learn from Mr. Greg Bowman. Mr. Greg, how you doing today, sir?

Greg Bowman (02:52)
I’m doing great, Quentin

Q Edmonds (02:53)
Absolutely, my friend. Listen, I’m glad that you’re here. We’re gonna have fun. And more importantly, we’re gonna talk about what we know best. And so I am the type, sir. I like to dive right in. I would love for you to tell people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got to the space you’re at, and then tell us what market you’re operating in. All right. So, Mr. Greg, sir, you got the floor, my friend.

Greg Bowman (03:20)
Well, thank you. Yeah. So I’m in Jacksonville, Florida. And prior to getting into real estate, I managed private clubs for about 30 years. So in the private club industry, there’s a lot of emphasis on service. So I manage a city club and I managed for 18 years the yacht club. When I decided that it was time to move away from the club business.

Club business is a lot of fun. But that’s for young people. I’m not young. So I decided I was gonna do something easy. Real estate. It’s easy to make a lot of money, right? Yeah. Nope. Yep. You don’t, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of time to develop contacts. It takes a lot of time to develop a portfolio, as in my case, what we have is property management.

Q Edmonds (04:01)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (04:17)
But initially I was interested in getting into sales. So I did, left the club business, decided to pursue real estate sales, did that for a little while, but then had an opportunity and met my current broker who I’ve been with now for let’s see about 10 years. Her name’s Tami Simon, great lady. I love the way she works. She’s ethical, she’s fun.

Q Edmonds (04:22)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (05:32)
She makes business something you want to do instead of something that you just have to do. Yeah. So she had started her property management division. She’s been in real estate for 25 years more. Her dad was a builder. In 2006, she started the property management division because real estate sales were kind of tough. That was a tough market time.

And she built a pretty good company. So in I guess it was 2014 or 15 when I met Tami through a friend and she and her husband interviewed me and from the beginning we just hit it off. She said, I like you. I said, Why? And but

She had the foresight to see that she could help to bring out of me all the service experience that I had and apply it to her company. So that’s something that we really pride ourselves on, is especially communication. So in property management, and a lot of your investors probably heard this before, property managers, a lot of companies just don’t answer their phones or it’s automated.

Q Edmonds (06:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (06:50)
And so when I’m talking with a new owner or an investor, and they tell me that, and I say, so do me a favor, pick up the phone now and call my company. And when you do, you’re gonna get a person. And then you’re going to eventually get to the person who you want to speak with. You may initially speak with a front-end manager or I’m sorry, administrator.

But once she asks you what your interests are, then she’s going to direct you to the person who can help you. I manage we’re structured a little bit differently. So I manage most all of the onboarding of new owners and investors and lease negotiations, so forth. And then I have managers who manage the day-to-day operations, maintenance, that type of thing.

Q Edmonds (07:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (07:43)
But with communications, I give my cell phone out to everybody. Owners, tenants, vendors, yeah, sometimes I get a call at 2 a.m. That’s okay. Yeah, it’s just the nature of our business. But it’s important to me, because I hear it all the time. Tenants, prospective tenants who want to lease a property that’s vacant and owner’s not making any money off of it, and I’m not making any money.

Q Edmonds (07:49)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (08:11)
But until it gets filled, the tenant wants to give us their money, but we won’t answer the phone. So that’s why it’s important. Answer the phone and talk to people, get to them quickly. You got to respond. People are so used to everything being automated nowadays that they’re just they’re grateful when they get to a person, right? So you can get to us and

Q Edmonds (08:17)
Yeah.

Yes, sir.

Yeah. Yes, sir.

Greg Bowman (08:37)
For instance, if you’re an owner or you’re a tenant, you have your own portal. So you can talk to us through the portal 24 hours a day. Somebody’s gonna see it. If you have an emergency and you put something in for a maintenance request, three people will see that as soon as it comes in. And if it is an emergency, we’re gonna get right on it. but also, like I said, I give people my cell phone. If you’re really freaking.

Q Edmonds (08:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (09:05)
Call my cell phone. Text me. And I and people do. It’s not just me, it’s also my managers. But that’s just how we operate. I think that’s part of our success.

Q Edmonds (09:06)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir. I love it, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for walking me through what you do, kind of how you got there, a little bit of the story. And so, Greg, I often say destiny has no wasted moments. Right. Meaning, as we’re going through life, we’re going through success, we’re going through failures, but all of it is making the people that we are today. So, Mr. Greg, in your journey, sir, what has the moments within this real estate space?

What has it taught you about yourself? Has it taught you discipline, resilience? What are some of the things that you have learned about you on this journey?

Greg Bowman (10:25)
Hmm. Well, early on I learned a lot of words coming out of my mouth that I didn’t even know I had. But over time you get better at it. Take a deep breath. Yeah. Because property management can be challenging. It’s 24-7. That’s just business is. And that’s why most smart realtors, that is this the people who sell and list, they don’t want to be in property management.

And smart investors don’t want to either. They don’t know it all the time. Sometimes they’ll have the mindset, well, I’m going to I’m gonna buy and flip. That’s good sometimes, but sometimes it’s better to buy and hold. And then they say, Well, I don’t want to pay somebody 10 or 15 percent to manage my properties. I can do it. Yeah, you can do that for a little while, and then you get tired.

Or if you’re really smart, you’re going to build your portfolio to the point that you can’t do all that and you need somebody to help you. And that’s where we come in.

Q Edmonds (11:26)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I love it, sir. But let me ask you this. Over the last two years, right, what’s one operational thing that you’ve been in put into place that is really helping you on the way you do business?

Greg Bowman (11:41)
New. I think more than being new is just refining what we already know we have to and should be doing. Let me give you let me give you a couple of examples when it comes to working with investors. So I work with a number of investors who live out of state. And North Florida is pretty attractive to real estate investors right now for a lot of reasons.

So I have investors who live in California. I have one in New Jersey, a number in New York. And sometimes they buy properties sight unseen. And to me that’s never a good idea. I think it’s a better idea to get on a plane, come see your property. But if you can’t, then you need someone who you can trust who can go to the property, knows what to look for.

And before you buy the property, do your due diligence due diligence before you ever get to the point where you’ve made an offer on that property, and then you’re going to go through, have a professional inspector look at the property. And not all investors do. I’ve had a number of investors who, when I ask them, can I see a copy of the inspection, the property inspection from when you bought the house, they say, well, I don’t have one.

Q Edmonds (12:54)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (13:04)
Well, why not? If anything is necessary. Okay, well, it probably was. But so what I do is when somebody calls me, I’ll take a look obviously first online. I want to find out what their objectives are. Are you more interested in buying than flipping or holding and building a portfolio? What’s your philosophy about managing that portfolio?

Q Edmonds (13:18)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (13:30)
We bought a company once, about a few, but about one a number of years ago, and I was speaking with the broker and we’re looking at buying his portfolio properties, and one of the first things he told me was, I love I love my owners, but my tenants. Like, what do you mean you hate your tenants? They’re paying your bills. They’re paying the owner’s bills, and they’re generally paying a premium.

Paying the insurance, the taxes, the mortgage if there is one. HOA, they’re paying all that. You need to love your tenants. And when I’m working with owners and tenants, I try to make it a just a team experience because if somebody doesn’t win, then odds are nobody’s gonna win. So and that goes for vendors too. So I need

Q Edmonds (14:16)
Yeah, yeah.

Greg Bowman (14:22)
not just to run interference between the entities. I need to try to bring people together. If there’s an expenditure, first of all, some investors want to be very involved so they want to make all decisions if they’re not in the area if they’re not living in that market whatever it is wherever they are maybe different.

Q Edmonds (14:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (15:30)
We have contacts who we vet our vendors. I shop them and I keep them honest. So if somebody gives me a price and an owner wants a another a second quote, I’m happy to do that at certain levels. If I do it too often, then the good vendors are gonna be like, Greg, you’re always asking me for quotes, but you never give me any business. And they’re gonna go away.

Q Edmonds (15:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (15:58)
That doesn’t work. Yes, sir. I’ve got to work with the vendors, find good ones who’s who are gonna take care of you. And the thing is, if you take care of them, they’re gonna take care of you, for instance, our AC vendors. Most of them I can get to a house within hours or at least same day. And sometimes the let me give just bring this up too, a a point of

Q Edmonds (16:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Greg Bowman (16:25)
caution for investors, don’t buy home warranties. I’m just telling you. Home warranties are okay for some of them. You got to read the fine print. They’re okay when you live in the house. But when you’re a tenant, they don’t care that the owner’s trying to save money and that vendor can’t get to their AC problem for two days. You don’t want to hear that.

Q Edmonds (16:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (16:51)
Yeah,

generally I don’t take on too many properties that have home warranties and I look at it closely before I do.

Q Edmonds (16:58)
Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this what’s the next real goal for you in the company? What are y’all looking to solve at scale next?

Greg Bowman (17:04)
Slow growth. We’re looking at slow growth because our portfolio, I think I told you earlier. So we manage properties that lease for anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand a month. And we have a good number that are in that higher range because that’s the sales market that Tami focused on for a long time. So those are in

a lot of gated communities, HOAs, so forth. Yeah. Over time you become an expert at dealing with those, but it takes a lot of time to manage those. Yeah. I’d like to build more multifamily management into my portfolio. I have a number now. Anywhere from duplexes up to about eight units. I don’t have very large ones.

Q Edmonds (17:50)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (17:55)
But but you learn as you go and to me those tenants who are probably they’ve been the tenants for quite some time and they’re probably going to continue for some time, they’re good tenants because they know how to be a good tenant. And sometimes someone who’s paying ten thousand dollars a month doesn’t know how to be good tenant.

Q Edmonds (18:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (18:22)
They’ve been owners and they’re leasing for a year or two. And you kind of got to work with them and train them what they can and can’t do because some people come in and they want to change the house. But if you want to change the house, we can arrange that, you can buy it.

Q Edmonds (18:37)
Right. There you go. Absolutely. So talk to me. I know you got the relationship with Tami. So I want you to talk to me about relationships. What’s your philosophy on building good, healthy business relationships? And what are some of the relationships in your circle that’s serving you well?

Greg Bowman (18:55)
So number one, be honest and ethical with everybody. I mean, sometimes I have to tell owners or investors bad news. Yeah. I could hold I could withhold it and not tell them and they’d like me more. But if I tell them, here’s the problem, and sometimes it’s a big problem. I’ll give you an example. So I had an investor, he brought me a portfolio of three

multifamily units. He did not have an inspection done on a particular house as a duplex. It’s a duplex with a pool. I mean it could be really cool.

But the homework really wasn’t done on that property. And so as we’re doing some renovations, we discover that the house has cloth wiring, which is okay. It can be okay.

But in the attic above the second floor was cloth wiring that was bare and it was laying across a galvanized pipe and it had energized a rat. The rat didn’t make it.

Q Edmonds (20:06)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (20:10)
The unit also has gas in the house. Okay, so if you get an energized metal pipe and you got gas flowing into the house, it’s probably not going to be a good outcome. And you know, you might get to the moon faster than the Tesla. I don’t know.

Q Edmonds (20:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Greg Bowman (20:28)
I don’t know who that is. It’s not Tuss anyway. So anyway, sometimes I have to go to an owner. That’s an expensive repair, and he didn’t know he had it in front of him. Yeah. And I couldn’t manage it because it was creating obviously had created an unsafe environment. So we had to rewire the house. So got him a good deal. But that’s a big chunk of change when you have a property that’s leasing

Q Edmonds (20:45)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (20:57)
Or one of them leases for about two thousand a month, the other one for fifteen hundred. So to recover thousands and thousands after the fact, that’s pretty difficult. That’s why I say something that I’ve really learned over the years is to do your homework up front. When you’re looking at buying a property, invite somebody in. A lot of times real estate agents, you may be working with a great real estate agent, but they don’t.

Q Edmonds (21:14)
Yeah.

Greg Bowman (21:22)
They don’t know property management. They don’t know leasing. That’s not their lane. Yeah. Bring in someone who does know it. We’re gonna look at the at not only the house, but the neighborhood. Is it well kept? Is it on a street? Is it busy? Are people going to look at the house? They love it, you put a lot of money into it, it’s beautiful, but it’s on a busy street. And when they walk in, they can hear car cars going by constantly. Yeah. And probably gonna be harder to lease.

So we have to look at all aspects. So when somebody brings me a property, that’s what I’m looking at. How can I help you make the most money? And is this gonna be a a a good investment for you or is this gonna be a challenge for both of us?

Q Edmonds (22:06)
Yeah, yeah. Mr. Greg, I thank you, man. This has been very, very good talking to you. Very, very good, learning about what it is that you do. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you, sir?

Greg Bowman (22:22)
They can go to WaterMarkePropertyManagement.com. Or then call myself. 904-662-5095. You can call me at 2a.m. I’ll be happy that you’re not a plumber. So we’re good.

Q Edmonds (22:27)
Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Greg Bowman (22:41)
Or email

me. Actually, if you send your email to [email protected], then you’ll get me and a bunch of other people.

Q Edmonds (22:55)
Yeah.

I love it, man. Well, listen, sir, I’m gonna thank you. Thank you so much for your time. I think time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for giving us some of your time. Thank you for your stories, man. I think stories have a way of planting seeds. We never know when it’s gonna grow, but the seed is there. So thank you for coming planting some real seeds. And lastly, thank you for the way you think. Thank you for your mindset and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today, sir.

Greg Bowman (23:22)
Thank you, Quentin. Pleasure meeting you.

Q Edmonds (23:24)
Pleasure meeting you as well. So listen, y’all heard Mr. Greg. His information is in the show notes. So please get in contact with him, especially if you’re in that Florida area. But definitely make sure you are subscribed here. Because I’m promising you, we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Greg. So, sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, y’all have a fantastic day.