Houlton Maine Investor - Advice needed

[Dave Thao]

Hello Forum! My name is Dave and I have been listening to BiggerPockets for the past several months and I am hooked. I am excited about REI regarding rentals and would like to make my first purchase in Houlton Maine or Northern part of Maine. I would love to connect with folks who have experience in this market area. Looking forward to hearing from everyone. Thanks.

[Ed Emmons]

You can find pretty good homes that can be purchased for cash in the $3000 to $8000 range. Then rent to own with $1500 or more down and payments of $400 - $500 a month for 2 to 5 yrs depending on how good the unit is. If a small park (under 30 units) could be purchased, you can add the lot rent to the equation. I own parks and look for trailers on private land. Then move the trailer to my park and hold paper on the trailer and the land separately. I would think in Houlton area you could find the units on land for under $15000. Depending on area resell land for similar terms as the trailer and do as above for trailer. The land is already set up with well, septic, utilities and mobile home pad so it should be marketable.

Bangor has many more possibilities but if your going to try to make a living on apartments I would caution on anything less than 6 units because the price per unit is usually to high to make much money and still cover turn over and repairs. The more units you can buy under one roof the better off you will be. Run the math on a per unit basis on apartments compared to a trailer park on the net income. On a park, one full time maintenance man can handle 100 pads if you don’t own trailers and probably 25-30 if you own the units.