CSC 66 Dave Rice: Smooth Sailing to Effective Multifamily Bookkeeping

My name is Dave Rice, and together with my wife Laurie, own REI Bookkeepers, a boutique bookkeeping firm exclusively for real estate investors. Being real estate investors ourselves for a number of years, we saw a need for knowledgable bookkeeping professionals in this niche. Laurie’s background is accounting, with a BS degree from the University of Wisconsin.

My background is small business with a BS in Pharmacy also from Wisconsin. Our backgrounds and years as successful entrepreneurs convinced us to hang out our virtual shingle.

That was two years ago. We are based in Naples, Florida and now serve clients virtually all across the United States. Together with technology such as cloud based accounting systems, video teleconferencing, telephone and email we are able to keep up with all of our clients. Anyone can say they are a bookkeeper. We are true bookkeeping professionals and our ace in the hole is Laurie’s accounting background. She understands the theory behind what we are doing and can think through the puzzle we are often asked to clean up.

What has contributed to our success? We are both very detail oriented, something that doesn’t often come naturally to a real estate investor. Their forte is often in the areas of finding deals and initiating sometimes uncomfortable conversations with distressed sellers. Often the after the fact details get lost in the mix. Which is why many more successful investors are outsourcing to services such as ours.

Our business arrangement works. Laurie does a great deal of the actual bookkeeping, especially the more complex transactions. I do all of our marketing, technology, client contact, manage the business side and as much bookkeeping as I can fit in. Most of our new clients come from referrals through existing clients or from a few referral partners.

How do we give back? We adopted our two children as infants from Korea many years ago. They are both adults now and I couldn’t be more proud any anything in our lives than our children. Our daughter is a University of Florida graduate and a Lieutenant in the United States Coast Guard, currently stationed in Washington DC. Our son is a retired US Army Infantry Officer with two tours in the Middle East. He lives here in Naples, is married with a two year old daughter (the new light of our lives) and another child on the way. Besides his career he is also in the midst of graduate school, getting an MBA from the University of Florida.

We’re also very active in our local church, a most unique organization. We are the largest outdoor congregation in the country. We celebrate every Sunday morning outdoors in the park. It’s an early sunrise service every Sunday for us. Laurie helps with hospitality and I set up chairs. We set up and take down somewhere between 500 and 2500 chairs for our guests. The question most often asked is what do we do when it rains? We get wet. Our latest mission through our church is to help a small church in High Rock, Grand Bahama. The church was the only one left standing in the settlement after Dorion. We sent a representative there two days ago to provide immediate financial assistance and to assess their long term needs. Right now that is finding lost family members. We just complete raising $78,000 which is enough to fill shipping container with building materials. It will be on the way to High Rock in about a week.

What is the best way to reach us? Through our website REIBookkeepers.com

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