Starting out as a private investor

[Michael Gonda]

Hi everyone

Wow, it's been over a decade since I was on BP, nice to be back.

My business partner and I have a fairly large portfolio of SFH's that we purchased as rehab projects using hard money. After doing this for 15+ years, almost all of our properties are paid off. As we get older, we no longer have the desire to add more homes to our portfolio.

That said, with our experience doing rehabs, working with private funding and with the majority of our homes paid off, we are now in a good place to start offering investment funding ourselves.  But obviously, we have spent the better part of 20 years on the buyer's side of the table, so we are looking for some general advice, tips/tricks, or even the pitfalls of setting up a hard money lending arm to augment our current business model. 

As you can imagine, we already have an attorney who specializes in real estate and an accountant who is well-versed in rental property accounting best practices (but she admits she doesn't have a lot of experience on the private lending side of the business). 

Are there any good materials (books, websites, etc.) you might recommend?  Any general advice you can share on getting this ball rolling?  We have a fair amount of money to lend and we want to see about getting things moving.  For the record, we are very comfortable with our local market in Pittsburgh PA so for the time being we will be sticking to loans in the region.

Thoughts? 

Thanks for reading