All Forum Posts by: Allan Smith

Cleanable and durable furniture is the key. Facebook marketplace will be the best deals. A lot of hassle tho.

We've used Encode for 2 years. Works good, but hospitable.com had integration issues. The lock itself does its job tho.

Taxes and insurance are such a small portion of rental expenses. They'd have to go up 300% to outpace a rent increase 2% or whatever.

for example, in chattanooga I have rentals where insurance is usually around $600/yr. 50/mo. They rent for say $1200/mo. 

so a 10% increase in insurance is only $5. Rent can match this with only a .004% increase.

I would put this back on the hoa. If there's nowhere to park they should pay for the parking. Part of your HOA fees is to have access to the garage. The hoa's insurance would probably cover this.

I know in Tennessee there are quite a few hard money lenders who will do 95% of cost, one or two will even do 100% of cost. This is all under the condition that you are buying it at a decent enough discount. The repairs plus the purchase price need to be no more than 75% of the exit price, known as the after repair value.

My advice would be to set goals based on why you want to get into real estate, and then search the forums and internet for information that helps you get to those goals.

I am excited for this mega thread.

Your buyer could certainly assume the loan and while it is advisable to inform the bank of this, I don't know that it is legally required. However, most sellers want their name taken off the loan so that they are not responsible for paying it if things go sideways later down the road. And the only way to do that is by communicating with the bank that you are exiting the partnership so they will take your name off the loan. If the asset has performed well for a while, that may be it and they won't make the new partner sign on.

Setting aside the fact that a listing agent should know how to price properties that they list, I would suggest talking to the broker at your firm. Ask them for their recommendations on pricing properties like this. Or perhaps there's other Brokers that are mentors to you that you can ask. I've not dealt much with commercial property, but comparable sales do not tell the whole story. Did you would want to find out what the business model was on those other sales and see how it compares to this one. If it's a similar business model then perhaps this one is worth more. It does seem like in this market sometimes the fundamental financials don't matter anymore and people will just pay anything for investments. So if that's the case, someone very well may pay the higher price for your asset but the market is softening so I would be wary.

Once your taxes start to get more complicated and need some strategy, that's when you hire the cpa. A good rule of thumb is if TurboTax doesn't do it easily anymore, it's probably time to upgrade. Once I had a few rental properties and into a couple flips I started hiring one.

CPA can be wherever, just make sure they have expertise in your state. Some will say that they can work for any state, but then they will not realize there's a different kind of LLC tax in your state, or whatever, and it will not go very smoothly .