New From Fort Lauderdale

[Elizabeth Maille]

Hi everyone! I'm Elizabeth and I just recently moved from Vermont to Fort Lauderdale, Fl with the intent of buying a multi-family investment property by the end of 2015. I'm new to to real estate investment and have been reading forums on here for the past few months and recently started listening to BP podcasts. I've spent the past couple weeks getting to know the area. I don't know anyone in real estate down here and am looking for real estate connections in and around Broward County. I have looked into the real estate groups but I haven't made it to a meeting yet. I have a couple questions: 1. I also have been going back and fourth between whether I should use hard money/private lender or if I should use an FHA loan and would love to here people's thoughts and opinions on this! 2. If I were to go the FHA route, how easy/hard is it to transfer it to an LLC down the road? I already have one and and curious about how and when I could do that? I appreciate any tips! Thanks!

[Mehran K.]

Big welcome to BiggerPockets @Elizabeth Maille. If you're planning on living in the multi-family property, FHA is the way to go. It's actually required that you live/intend to live there for as an owner-occupant. Transferring the property to an LLC later down the road isn't illegal, but it violates the Due-On-Sale clause and the lender "could" call the note due/force correction. Do some research on the forums about the DOS clause.

I wouldn't use a hard money lender for a buy & hold without a few exit strategies to get into some other type of long term financing.