Residential (4 units) or Commercial Multi-family?

[Kim Allard]

Dear fellow members,

With all your experience, may I pick your brain please?!

My husband and I are at a junction. We want to acquire multi-families within the first half of this year in the Miami-Dade and Broward area.

We have to take a decision about how to use the capital at our disposal as well as how to make the best use of our borrowing capacity.

We want to invest in multi family as we realized that condos and SFR will not get us where we want to be within timeframe.

2 options:

1) use our capital to make down payments on as many multi family as possible through conventional loans (which means a max of 4 mortgages x 4 units each = 16 doors)

Or

2) use our capital to make a down payment on a commercial property of 12 -20 doors and not use our personal borrowing capacity

Objective wouldn’t be to stop there but to continue to acquire some buy and hold multi family properties after these initial acquisitions.

Any thoughts and/or piece of advice on how to move the pieces on the chessboard?

Many thanks in advance!