You can now pay your rent at Kroger

While we don’t accept cash for rent payments in any of our offices, we do allow tenants to pay cash using our partner “Pay Near Me”. Simply go to most Walgreens, CVS, 711, or Ace Cash Express. You give them a special QR code available from your tenant portal (if you don’t see it, please contact us). Give them your cash payment, and it instantly shows up on your tenant ledger.

This is a good way to avoid a late fee and the hassle of buying a money order and going and dropping it off (also more secure).

As the title suggests, we’re happy to announce that Kroger has been added to the mix.

For more information about this service, visit our pay near me page.

By request: More information about our Outside Leasing Manager position

For years we have offered various opportunities for those looking to make some extra money by leasing our properties. We’ve felt that the more units someone is able to lease, the more they should make. Not simply by leasing more and thus getting more of a set commission. But by actually increasing the amount each new lease pays the more leases are done.

Because this is something we’ve discussed enough times with people, we felt it deserved it’s own page. For more information about this program, visit our outside leasing manager page.

Thanks for the image, ChatGPT

Our Dakota Lofts property in the news

Congrats to our manager Russel, as featured in the story. Below is a link to the Texas Monthly article. To view our Dakota Lofts property page, click or tap here

From the story: “Gonzalez gave me a sneak preview in April at Houston’s Dakota Lofts, first leading me through the lobby he turned into an informal gallery since becoming the building’s manager a few years ago. Hodge was the first artist he invited to show work there.”

Robert Hodge, left, and Russel Gonzalez. Photo credit: Molly Glentzer

A peek behind the curtain… Our most popular listing

We just took over management of a few properties in the museum / midtown area. One of them had a small studio unit. The previous owner listed it for $550 in the past so we decided to honor that pricing. It’s nothing fancy. And it’s small. But it’s in a good area and part of a small 5 unit property.

We received so many inquires on that listing that it actually caused our average total daily inquires to double. Which is crazy given we manage about 1,700 units. At the very end of the week the increase vs. the previous dropped as this unit was taken off the market.

The info below is only capturing people who emailed us via search sites like apartments.com, zillow, har, etc. and does not capture people who saw our listings and called.

In total, in the week it was live, over 100 people inquired about that unit through search sites. I’m proud to note that we responded to each one (the reason I’m proud of that is we hear from prospects all the time that they email listings and never hear from property managers. We make sure everyone gets an email and a text back within 15 minutes, and we normally follow up a few times after that. Here is an old owners blog on the topic).

Even though this listing got a lot of attention, it tracked with our normal response rate of about 20%. Meaning of the 100 people who emailed us about it, only about 20 of them replied to our text/emails back to them (which is no problem as we understand many people are just browsing on those sites and don’t really want to be contacted).

Map improvements

We’ve updated the Fat Property locations map to have a few different layer options. This helps finding a property where you want to live even easier. Now you can turn off layers that you might not be interested in such as our sold properties, or commercial, or single family homes.

Note that while the map page shows all our locations, our rentals page shows the units at our properties that our managers have listed for lease. If you see a property on our map site that isn’t on our rentals page, you’re always welcome to call our team to see when a unit over at the property you want may be coming up.

A friendly Fat Property team member at our Montrose HQ can help you out M-F, 9-5:30

click or tap the image to view a live version of this map

Happy to announce some new properties!

A few of them are in the museum district submarket, so we’ve added that as a menu option when you click or tap the ‘properties’ button on the top of our site. Another of the new properties are in midtown, so we tossed it in that menu section.

We’re happy to add these to our portfolio. It allows us to continue to offer affordable rental options for those looking to be in central areas of town. Rents start at under $800.

“He pauses shaving and he tells himself that he is the bomb
She has her curlers set, her credit cards are paying the funds”