New Investor - Rochester, NY

[Daniel Lehman]

Hello, I just wanted to formally introduce myself; My name is Dan Lehman and I am a Rochester, NY native who is looking to become a real estate investor/agent. While I haven't acquired my first rental yet and I'm still taking the 75 hour course for my license, I am doing heavy research while I save with my cousin to partner up and start investing.

I also want to network with people who are involved in real estate in Rochester. I am looking to create ties with not just investors, but real estate agents, PMs, appraisers, bankers, lawyers and more.

To give you an idea of what my goals are currently, I want to build up a massive portfolio of multifamily properties ranging all the way from 2 to 100+. I am highly interested in multifamily properties to buy and hold but would also like to do the occasional house flip. As far as having my real estate license in concerned, I am working towards getting licensed as a means of becoming a more successful investor.

If you can just take the time to do a short introduction of yourself I would really love getting to know you and hopefully we can have a great business relationship someday.

[Michael Wagner]

Originally posted by @Daniel Lehman:

Originally posted by @Michael Wagner:

@Daniel Lehman,

Welcome to BP.  Its a great way to connect with folks.  As for a brief intro, I started in multi-family as you hope to do and have since transitioned all of my efforts to investing in Self Storage.  To me, it has all the same benefits as multi-family but with several distinct advantages.  Both are viable options for sure.  I wish you all the best, I think you will find BP and the ROCHESTER BP community is a very good bunch of folks build your team from.

Mike

 Hey Mike, thanks for your introduction. I was wondering what those distinct advantages are in the self storage world. 

 Its important to note that Storage also has some additional challenges that you wouldn't experience in MF but the advantages outweigh the drawbacks by a large margin in my opinion.   Of those advantages, I would say the biggest is the underlying financials.  In self storage, the typical expense to income ratio is 30-35%....meaning you will spend 30-35% of gross revenue on operating expenses. In MF, that ratio is 50% or more. With that you have a 15-20% greater margin of error in self storage vs. multi-family.  That results in a much lower break even occupancy (assuming comparable debt service). This is one of the primary reasons that self storage loans default less often than any other real estate backed mortgage on the planet (including single family owner occupied homes). Less than 8% of SS mortgages go into default.

A second huge advantage is that you are not dealing with habitational real estate. This means that you do not have to worry about evictions when a customer/tenant doesn't pay. Rather than having to deal with evicting a tenant, self storage owners simply, send a certified letter, publish a legal notice in a local paper and then au ction of the contents of the storage unit to reclaim their unit.  

There are others but its SUPER  Bowl Sunday so the rest will have to wait:)....check out my blog here on BP for a primer in storage if you have any interest....there's a couple case studies and a overview of the finances there for you to peruse.  

Happy to answer other questions you might have as you dive into Rochester Real Estate.

Mike