Long overdue success story

[Neerav Patel]

This is my first success story and it is truly long overdue, so please accept my apologies. 

Biggerpockets helped me tremendously for this success and want to thank the whole community for that.

Since I was working as an IT contractor, I used to switch places very fast. After marriage, we decided to buy our house. But we were shocked when the agent told us that generally speaking if you buy home and sell in before 5-7 years, you actually loose money since we have to account for commissions, taxes, repairs, etc. So I started looking for alternatives to avoid that and that's how I found out biggerpockets and BRRR methodology.

We did study hard for real estate knowledge including books, podcast and area. Put lots of offer and always missed by something. After that from one podcast we found out that some foreclosures (specially government ones like HUD, Fannie mae, etc) offers owner occupant bid times for few days. We did find few properties like that but again was beaten to that race most of the time.

ntil one day in morning, I saw one property in HUD site in the perfect neighborhood. We went to see a very same day. The property was in a very good neighborhood and was way lower priced. But we did notice something odd. Property was listed as 3 bed 2.5 bath but was 4 bed and 3.5 bath and sqft looked off too. When I went to the county website, I realized they did not counted upstairs at all(It is cape cod). They were off by 300 sqft 1 bed and 1 full bath off.

HUD has 10 day timeline for all owner occupants to bid, so when we went there again to check it out on 9th day, there were 35 agent cards on kitchen countertop. We did realize that it is a fierce competition. So we did shoot very high and finally got the property.

Below are details-

Asking - $167k 

Listed as- 1650 sqft 3 bed 2.5 bath 2 car garage

Repairs needed - Flooring, HVAC(radiant to forced air with AC), 2 full bath remodel, deck rebuild, Kitchen remodel, appliances, new gutters, small plumbing, sewer line repair going to main, garage roof repair, raccoon living on garage attic , tree removal, landscaping

Offered price - $191k

Original - 1919 sqft 4 bed 3.5 bath 2 car garage

We got our property, renovated it and did many things ourselves such as painting, bath remodels. We were also fortunate that township was doing sewer work and they did fix our problem with no cost.

Total repair expenses - $30k

ARV - $330k

Before picture

After Picture

We refinance and got HELOC from that spread and rolled into other property. I will not go into details about that one just to keep it from being too long.

We also started Airbnb with our upstairs bedroom and start renting our garage and those basically pays mortgage and a small amount left from it sometimes.

We are really fortunate that we found biggerpockets and want to thank whole community. 

Hopefully, my story can help someone in the future.