an emotional coaster ending with living free

[Jacob Manoni]

Investment Info:

Small multi-family (2-4 units) buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $229,000
Cash invested: $8,250

This is our first house hack and it was a roller coaster of emotions, please give some feed back and maybe some advice on how to quickly move on to the next property, I'm writing this while i'm at my annual training with the national guard so I can't post pictures but I will post some when I return home.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

Wanting to see what it was like to live for free with a low down payment.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

On Realtor.com the numbers made sense even from the asking price so there wasn't a lot of negotiating.

How did you finance this deal?

FHA with 3.5% down

How did you add value to the deal?

We are currently in the process of updating the appliances and painting the kitchen in order to raise the rent a bit since the rent was already pretty low compared to the market for the area.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

Don't use a big bank for an FHA loan, the whole process took about 8 months and the first 7 we were with chase (who is our employer). They told us we were waiting on an appraisal because the property type is uncommon for our area and it was difficult to find someone willing to do it. Once we finally got it they told us they couldn't approve the loan because it didn't meet FHA guidelines. The other big lesson is to communicate with the seller when having issues it made it a lot less stressful.

Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

We worked with Cody Haycraft with movement mortgage, he was able to take a 7 month process and close it within a month and a week. He definitely saved our deal and if it wasn't for him we wouldn't be living this life right now, we'd hands down still be looking