All Forum Posts by: Aaron Breiding

If it's in a C neighborhood chances are you will make tenants happy with a security system because you will be attracting tenants from C neighborhoods. I have seen systems in A & B neighborhoods so I don't think you'll be scaring anyone away by having one. Not to mention you get a discount on your homeowners for having one installed. Some of them also have alerts for smoke/carbon. Overall, it shows you are serious about their safety.

I use FrontPoint security. They are more expensive than ADT but they are also better in my opinion and burglars aren't used to disarming them compared to ADT and Slomin (which seems to make up the majority of security systems). I will always have systems and motions lights on every side of the house in my rentals as I want to make it clear to my tenants that I care about their safety. 

@Aaron Breiding Since I work with a lot of investors, I am often courted by hard money lenders much like how realtors are often courted by mortgage brokers. My clients here in Orlando, Florida typically purchase homes with zero inspection, without contingencies and need to make sure when they put a deposit down a property they have a reliable hard money lender that will fund on time. With that being said, I have witnessed horror stories as other agents in my office have had hard money lenders promise to fund on time and the day of closing back out of the deal. There are multiple reasons for this happening. 

The majority of the time when deals don't close are because:

1. Sometimes private lenders over commit and do not have enough capital to fund deals

2. They find out the investor presented bad comps then decide to back out after giving an approval. Aka wholesaler inflated values to get a sale.

3. The deals dont fund on time because the lenders aren't given paperwork on time.

4. Many hard money lenders say they can close within a short time frame but really take longer. Most lenders say they can close in a week here in town, but it really takes about 10 to 14 business days.

In the past I've had success by doing the following

1. Shop around and get commitments from different hard money lenders. 

2. Make sure you have a specific property in mind when talking to lenders. Have them do as much of their underwriting process before contracting on the property as possible.

3. Get referrals from folks that have actually had a deal fund with hard money lenders.

4. Make sure you stay on top of them to ensure they fund on time. I normally tell them I need to fund sooner than I really need to. If it is closing in 10 days, I tell them that I need to close in 8.

5. When you find one to work with, keep two on deck as a back up in case something goes wrong. 

6. Tell a friend if you find a good hard money lender :)

@Russell Brazil great advice. I is one and have been one.. and that is exactly what a good HML does.. when I was in the trade I looked at every loan ( the ones in PDX) the out of state one's were more a high volume machine type play and very small so risk was less.

@Aaron Breiding  you should only pay for valuation.. how you want to get set up is get with the lender you want to use have them vette you financially.. then its just a matter of lining up the property... and you should know a good deal from a bad one pretty quickly

I do not use hard money, however I know plenty of people who do.  

If I were you though I would use a hard money lender.  There is one huge benefit I feel to using hard money that does not get mentioned very often.  That is that the hard money lender is going to come out and review your project.  So you are getting another set of eyes from a very experienced investor on your project.  If they look at it and do not want to lend on the project it is a project you should be running away from.  If they do want to lend on it, you have a very good chance of making some nice money on the project.