General Contractor Recommendations

[Renee Stark]

Hello! My husband and I are newbie real estate investors and looking to buy and hold in the Augusta area (although we live in Las Vegas). We are planning to use a little cash savings as well as our 90k HELOC to BRRR a property. In fact, we have one in particular in mind that our realtor gave us a tour of last weekend (flew out there for a quick trip). We have met with one contractor already, but are looking for referrals for any other reliable general contractors in the area. We want to get a few bids on the property if we can. Having to manage this renovation from afar, we clearly need somebody reliable, efficient and honest (although we are looking into hiring a third-party project manager who is local and can serve as our representative). Any recommendations are greatly appreciated!

[Jim K.]

@Renee Stark

Your first investment is going to be a BRRRR property about eight states away from you. As far as a reliable team in place goes, you have a realtor, you're working on a contractor (but you plan on getting several bids), and you suspect you want to hire a property manager in Georgia. I can immediately think of four problems with the plan.

1. You mention nothing about your personal understanding of the renovation process.
2. You offer no details of the property itself.
3. Your renovation budget is maybe around $90K of your your retirement savings. What you're basing this figure on is unclear.
4. You make no mention of perhaps the most important problem with your plan from a contracting standpoint...today is August 7.

I'm sorry, Renee, it really looks like you're about to get screwed. If you don't, it will be close to a miracle, and then you'll just take the wrong things you will have mislearned from an abnormal result to your next project and get screwed there.

Long-distance renovation-for-profit is very hard. Doing it hands-off and entrusting the management to a general contractor with additional oversight by a property manager is even more difficult, especially when you don't have a long-term relationship with any of the people doing the work, with years of built-up trust and respect between you. A lot of that trust and respect comes from whether or not you actually know something about these people and what they do. I have to say that given what you've written, it really seems likely that you don't, especially given the very big detail that you're overlooking in this whole discussion.

It's August 7th, and the property is in Georgia. The best people for this work have been booked solid since the middle of March. Any local GC who has time to spare to pick up a major project like this right now will be at best highly questionable. Any subs the GC finds with enough free time to handle the work will be even more questionable. Could it go right? Oh, sure. But that's a low-low-probability outcome.

Yes, I understand that you have to learn somewhere. And you will probably lose money going through the learning curve (as an investor, I was no exception whatsoever to this). But starting out as investors in residential renovation this way, with the stakes this high and so many chances for things to go wrong, it just can't be your best option. I think there are better ways.

Whatever you choose to do, good luck to you.

[Dan Noci]

Vert good advice .

Las Vegas is booming do the investing here Why you have more control 

Control is thr key word . No body will watch your money like you do.

Good luck

Dan

Hard money lender 20 yrs

[Alecia Loveless]

@Renee Stark Agree with the posts that have been written. I have worked with my contractor for about 23 years. I trust him implicitly but still regularly find myself at the job site checking on things. I also monitor the expenses daily.

Managing a rehab is a lot of work. I’ve been doing real estate a long time and my most recent renovation is already about 5 months over our original projected completion period. We’ve been at the mercy of the subcontractors who are booked out solidly. I waited for the electrician for about a month and then when he showed up the power company had forgotten to bring their supplies for the project so now waited another 14 days. The work is now scheduled tomorrow. Fortunately our budget is still on track with the exception of the additional holding costs.

I can only imagine the headache of trying to do all this long distance. That’s why I’ve opted to stay local.

[Hardy Vibert]

@Renee Stark

Eric Cervantes (Vegas)(Contractor/Painter)

(702) 969-7910

Noe Estanley Rodas (Vegas) (Electrician) ⚡️⚡️

(702) 624-7721

Feel Free to PM, I remodeled a property in Vegas while living in California took, 60 days to remodel and I visited twice :)

Feel Free To PM

[Michael Smythe]

@Hardy Vibert their property is in Augusta, Georgia!

[Renee Stark]

Thank you everybody for your advice! We are taking this all heavily into consideration. Our numbers for the property we had mentioned did not end up panning out after we did some more calculations, so we did not end up moving forward with it. The renovation was going to be far too expensive for what we wanted to do to it. 

The reason we are looking in Augusta at all is due to the lower cost of entry and it seems like it is a lot easier to find cash flowing deals out there. The vegas market leaves us far too upside down in terms of our ultimate goal of buy and hold investing. We are just trying to navigate our way to our end goal!

Once again I greatly appreciate all of the tips and insight you all provided! Thank you!

[Jim K.]

@Renee Stark

Sometimes you just have to throw all the advice to the contrary in the backseat and just do something. I'm very glad you decided this wasn't the time. Good job. Since you do plan to go ahead investing elsewhere, the best piece of advice I have for you on that is to make sure you have people in the ground whom you can trust absolutely to do what they say they will do. I have rarely seen long-distance renovation outfits make it here in Pittsburgh, for instance, without a brother or cousin or lifelong family friend as the onsite property manager or overall reno GC of the investor. And just because the investor and the lead person onsite are related is no guarantee of success by itself -- the lead person also has to be thoroughly competent.

[Heath Thomas Jr]

@Renee Stark everyone here as provided some good advice but if you are committed to investing in the Augusta market, I would recommend looking into lenders that can provide renovation financing. 

1. They should have a list of vetted contractors you can reach out to

2. You should not rely on them to fully replace you for oversight on the project, but they will work directly with the contractor on payment and ensure targets are being hit before money is released to them

3. You can roll the cost of renovation into the loan (less money out of pocket on the front end) and not need to refinance once the project is complete