Real Estate IRA Provider Technology Trends for Your Account

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Clay: Hi everyone, and welcome to the REI Classroom. My name is Clay Malcolm with New Direction IRA, and today we’re going to be talking about the technology that IRA providers will often offer their real estate investors.

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Clay: So, to kick off our talk today, and we’re going to be talking about IRA providers and the technology that they provide for their account holders when it comes to real estate today, I’ll just say that, you’ve probably noticed that your online banking and all of your financial procedures outside of your IRA have become much faster, much more transparent and easier over the last 5 or 10 years. And this is something that the IRA industry has lagged a little bit behind. So, some of the things that I’ll tell you today are just trends and goals for the industry and some of them are actually already in place. And so the reason I bring this up is because, not all self-directed IRA providers that handle real estate are the same. And so it’s often tough for an account holder to decide which criteria they’re looking at or things like that or what the possibilities are.
So let’s just take a look at it and if we think about it in terms of the important part of a customer service relationship with an IRA provider, is probably from an IRA perspective, both education and technical convenience. So one of the things you’re always looking for is, does your provider give you a lot of free education and access to education? It’s very hard to have the entire knowledge base at your fingertips at any given moment, but if you know where to go for the resource, it’s much more workable in terms of finding out a rule on a particular idea or scenario that you have in your head. So, that’s one of the things that I think with online websites as well as downloads and things like that, streaming, you can often get that information easily as long as your provider will give it to you.
Secondly, in terms of technology conveniences, certainly with real estate, because there’s a lot of money in and out, the transparency and the speed with which those transactions and those flows of money are represented is really an important thing. So, for instance, some IRA providers have a free online bill pay, meaning that when your IRA needs to pay the insurance or the taxes or the kid who cuts the grass, you would be able to just go onto your secure online portal, type in who the payment goes to and then the check would leave the IRA provider and they would do that for free. Now, some have online where they don’t do it for free. So again, comparing the fee that’s associated with online bill pay, might also be a criteria for you.
On the theme of electronic movement of funds, some IRA providers will allow you to have the renter of your property pay their rent to your IRA online. And some don’t. So, that’s another way to evaluate the convenience for you and also the level of service that you’re getting from your provider. And the speed with which those transactions are reflected on your online portal assuming that your provider has one, and most of them do, is also a way that you can get a sense of transparency and also that the information is flowing back to you in a reasonable way so that you can make management decisions. And part of the reason that this is important is because the property management for IRA on properties can be a little bit tricky unless you have a convenient way to handle all the machinations.
Now, certainly you can hire a property manager, or your IRA can hire a property manager. In that case, you would be looking to see if your IRA provider would link up with them so that they would have some conveniences as well. So there are all kinds of things that are going on in the industry as the IRA industry starts to catch up with the regular financial industry in terms of convenience and movement of your money, transparency, secondary authentication type environments where you might be able to change your address on your account online rather than having to mail in a form, change your beneficiaries, things like that. All those are available in the here and now.
So, if your IRA provider doesn’t have some of these things, then you might want to look around for other providers and see if it’s economical for you to move. Now, in the future there will certainly be even more of these types of things where you can actually activate transactions online and things like that. And we’re working hard to make that happen industry-wide, as well as here at the New Direction IRA. So, please look for those in the future and keep up-to-date because it can really make a difference in your IRA investing.
Thanks for joining me on the REI Classroom, I’m Clay Malcolm at New Direction IRA. We’ll see you next time.

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