All Forum Posts by: Aaron H.

You can try digging around on facebook, google, etc. and seeing if you can find a number, but most of the time getting semi-reliable phone info will require spending at least a little money. Try searching the forums for "skip tracing" for suggestions on lots of other sites/services besides whitepages.

If you search the forums, you'll find lots of info on 1031 exchanges. To radically simplify, it means they're selling another property with the intention of moving their proceeds from that sale into purchasing your property. They'll have a variety of restrictions on timeline and how the money has to be moved. But from your perspective, you'll still get paid at closing, same as any other purchase. You'll just have to make sure you can work around their timeline.

Depends on how high-end your rental is. For lower end stuff, the off-the-shelf Sahara Desert Sand paint from Walmart is cheap and a decent lightish beige.

On nicer places with better paint I've used Kilim Beige and Ice Cream, both shades look great.

If the property still cash flows at a 7 or 8% interest rate, and it's the only way you can find to acquire it, then I'd say go for it. It's worth it to get your feet wet. You should talk to the bank about whether, with your dad as a co-signer, you can use his income to help qualify and reduce the interest rate. You can also always refinance a couple years down the line into (hopefully) a lower interest rate, once you have the income to support doing so.

There's too many factors to your personal financial situation to give you any kind of reliable advice on what's possible in terms of construction funding. Your best bet is to talk to some local banks and explain what you want to do, and explore what your options are. If you have a significant amount of collateral owned free and clear, you ought to be able to use that to get a construction loan.

Never used one and have no opinion on that specific site, but I'd personally never pay a wholesaler for leads. They get paid when we close.

I'd still only do it if you feel comfortable assessing some level of property condition on your own. I don't trust tenant opinion on anything, certainly not whether e.g. the furnace is nearing end of life. Waiving an inspection contingency doesn't mean "have no idea what you're buying." You still need to do some level of due diligence. You'd also want to make sure you have adequate reserves to fix something when you're wrong.

Also makes more sense if the property was built ten years ago than if you're buying something that's 100+ years old.

You wouldn't know - as Marc says, it can cause infighting. It just requires slightly more work on your part to submeter than the other route.

There are also some new companies with fancy wireless submetering tech that you can attach e.g. to each water fixture in the house that are supposed to let you submeter without actually redoing the plumbing or installing a second meter. I've never used them, but I've heard good things.

Ah, I read it backwards. In theory you could refuse to grant the easement, and force him to do the longer run under the driveway. But if you already have other utilities running through your property, and you have a good relationship with him, there's no reason to say no to granting the easement and letting him do it the easy way. Shouldn't be a problem for reselling your house unless the work was done poorly (think broken sewer line in your yard) or something. If anything, the new owners would be happy the easements were all already in place and not going to be a headache for them down the line with a grumpy neighbor.

The best info on any possible complications will still be the city, though - they'd need to approve the new path for the sewer line, offsets from the water service, etc. They should be able to tell you if you're running any unnecessary risks you're not thinking of. But most of the time, this kind of thing should be pretty straightforward.

You don't have a location listed, your odds of getting a useful response are pretty close to zero...