New member from East Texas

[Joe Ferguson]

I am in Longview (East Texas) and have been intrigued with REI for about 10 years I just never had the knowledge or money to jump in and buy my first deal. About 3 years ago, with no expertise & no clue of what to do, I saved enough money to buy a 20k partial burned house & did the rehab on my own. With about 34k all in (& 6 months later) I owner financed it (had it in contract 48 hrs after posting on craigslist) for $55k, 10% interest, 10% down payment, & I escrow the taxes and insurance. It's been a very easy deal as I don't have to do any repairs & a great return on investment... but I had no cash to do any more deals. Fast forward a year or two... saved some more cash.. did some research, analyzed deal after deal, came across a couple cheap ran down homes (not at same time) via craigslist & was able to double up on my investments within 30 days or less on both deals. That got me fired up. Mean while, my wife and I had purchased a few lots in a newer subdivision with dreams of building our dream home eventually... My idea was to build & sell new construction on two of the lots & the third we'd keep... Again, no mentor, no idea how new construction worked just had the drive to figure it out and I had a back up plan to build it how we would want to live if it didn't sell (prob why we put more in to the home then we should have) and a year to the date after we broke ground we closed on the sell to a cash buyer & profited around 20k... not the home run I was hoping for but at this point we had 20k more then we had had and it was very little money out of our pocket (besides between draws) because the appraisal was good and we had an interest only loan from the local bank. Now we had a little more cash to play with & we came across a couple more foreclosures we were able to flip & make good profits with minimal work. The latest deal we've done is we bought a home in January from auction.com for 31k (after winning the bids for a couple months they finally sold it to me), put 80k in complete remodel & addition (went from 2/1 to 3/2 with everything new & replaced hoping for minimal repairs for at least 5 years) , moved a tenant in March 1, went to refinance (BRRR method) & it appraised for $152k... not bad (means I would only be 5k cash all in after refinance). Then the bad news came, we had only owned the property 4 months and were borrowing 80k more then we paid for the house originally (even though we had 80k cash of our own money in rehab!).. That's a no go with Fannie Mae. So instead of going 5 yr ARM at 5% commercial loan we opted to get a line of credit against the property since we owned it free & clear until we had owned it long enough to please Fannie. (bank said 6 months, others say 1 yr). I analyze deals daily and make a couple offers a week but haven't came across our next deal yet. I've bounced all over the real estate investment board trying to find my niche. We love the fast cash of flipping but hate the capital gains tax... Love the idea of BRRR & long term investing with financial freedom & early retirement being our main goals just hard to see the $200 rental profit a month come in when we could've made quick $20k on a flip. I've been researching multi family & think that's where I will eventually end up I just haven't came across the right deal or have the knowledge yet. I've been a member of BP for a while just never got fully involved so here is my first step! Looking forward to meeting many new people with similar goals!