Help! How can I scale when cannot leverage equity?

[Kristina Baljak]

I own a 3 Family investment property in a trendy neighborhood in Queens NY.  Purchased in  2013 $650, Current value $1.3 M. I have a $375K  2.5% 15 year loan, paid off in 8 years. I house hacked for years till we purchased our primary residence 2 years ago. I want to scale but don't know how. I don't think its wise to refi since I'm locked into a great rate. Yet I have all this equity I can't access. Any advice would be much appreciated

[JD Martin]

Quote from @Kristina Baljak:

I own a 3 Family investment property in a trendy neighborhood in Queens NY.  Purchased in  2013 $650, Current value $1.3 M. I have a $375K  2.5% 15 year loan, paid off in 8 years. I house hacked for years till we purchased our primary residence 2 years ago. I want to scale but don't know how. I don't think its wise to refi since I'm locked into a great rate. Yet I have all this equity I can't access. Any advice would be much appreciated

That's where you just have to make a decision on what's more important to you, maintaining the low rate or accessing the capital that's in the house. You probably can't get it done now, since you moved out, but while it was your primary you could have done a HELOC to be able to access that money if/when you found something worth buying.

Scaling only makes sense if you can make the money available in the house make a better return than where it is now. Theoretically if you buy something now you are going to have to make at least a 7-8% return in order to make it make sense, regardless of where you get the money from. Can you make that kind of return in your area, or where you want to invest? Getting even a 1% monthly (12% annual) return on rentals right now is pretty tough in a lot of the country.