Two Grads Seeking Help (and some direction on the forums)

[Rashaud S.]

Hi everyone,

My partner and I have recently graduated from college and, after doing lots and lots of research and reading, we're finally ready to try our first deal.

Here's where we are: I graduated last year and have been working full-time for almost a year and he, having just graduated, will start working full-time shortly. We both have good credit and intend to be very careful with it (we're going to form an LLC to protect ourselves as soon as we can, for example). I'm currently applying to medical schools so my time, money, and ability to take out loans is very limited, whereas my partner's are not limited to the same extent. Our long-term goal is to generate a sizable rental income, so we'd prefer to purchase rentals asap, but we're not opposed to flipping homes if the opportunity presents itself and the numbers look right. We're targeting the NYC/Westchester County and Atlanta Metro areas and we're anxious to jump into the business now while we're still recovering from the crash.

Having identified what appear to be excellent candidates for our first property, the problem that we have is money -- being barely out of school, we don't have the money on hand to cover the down payment on a mortgage, let alone the costs for improvements and closing costs. We've been trying to leverage our networks to talk to family, friends, and potential investors, but that hasn't been working out so far. We've come up with some really creative ideas for financing, but, again, we can't implement them without some cash. We're totally in favor of seeking seller financing, but that seems to be an awfully rare occurrence, as far as we can tell, since that requires the seller's to own the property free and clear. So, we're approaching this from the POV that seller financing is not an option.

Do any of you have any suggestions for where we could find investors and/or financing and any suggestions what options/alternatives we should look into? We've thought about hard money loans, but we're worried the terms of that kind of financing (high interest rates, high down payment, and short term = really high monthly payment) will put us into a hole.

Thanks for your responses!

-Rashaud