How We Bought a Duplex With No $ and Got $10k at Closing

[Tara Piantanida-Kelly]

My husband and I are “buy and holders”, and we’ve been slowly adding to our rental property portfolio for the past few years. The more we learn, the more creative we get.

Our first purchase together, a duplex for just under $75k, was super conventional: we purchased in our name (not our LLC), we paid retail, we put 30% down and got a 30-year conventional residential mortgage. We've learned a lot since then, but I would STILL make the same purchase today. It had a 20+% CoC return, and cash-flows like a sonofagun! Initially, our plan was to save the cash flow until we had enough to put 30% down on our next purchase, but we learned more and went in a few different directions.

Our next purchase, a SFH, was a foreclosure we purchased on Auction.com using just a bit of our own capital with private money covering the remainder. We still purchased in our name, but we got instant equity by buying a $75k house for $50k. We found a portfolio lender who didn't require the 6-month seasoning, so we put a conventional mortgage on the place right away and repaid the private money and ourselves.

Our next purchase, a SFH, we purchased in our LLC's name and paid $10k cash for it at a county tax auction.

We also each had former primary residences that we’d turned into rental properties.

When we found this duplex, we were planning to go the conventional route again - put 30% down, get a conventional mortgage for the remainder. Then I had another idea. We had three properties with a good amount of equity in them. Why not see if we could find a local lender willing to do a blanket mortgage on three existing properties plus this new one? We also wanted all of the properties and the blanket mortgage to be in our LLC's name.

One of our local portfolio lenders said they could do this, so we began the process. I make this sound effortless, but it most certainly wasn't! This was something pretty out of the ordinary for the attorneys (the bank's and ours), and it took more than five months from accepted offer to closing. The three existing properties were in three different counties, each had a mortgage with a different lender, and they were all in my husband's name. We had to have surveys and abstracts for all four properties. We had to pay a mortgage tax on the new blanket mortgage in the county with the highest rate, and then prove to the other two counties that the mortgage tax had indeed been paid. My husband had to do three quit-claim deeds moving the existing properties into our LLC, and we had to record docs in three different counties. Our (very seasoned) real estate attorney said that he had just closed a $12million dollar deal that wasn't NEARLY as complicated as this one, and he brought one of his new junior associates to the closing as a learning opportunity.

When all is said and done:

• We will have four properties in our LLC,
• We will have a new cash-flowing rental property,
• The three mortgages on the existing properties in my husband’s name will be paid off,
• My husband will be able to borrow more mortgages in his name,
• We will have about $2300/month in cash flow from the four properties (rents minus blanket mortgage P&I + taxes + insurance),
• We will have about $10k in our pocket after all closing costs and expenses are paid.

Then on to the next deal!