All Forum Posts by: Al Seward

My wife and I are looking at going through NACA to get a multi-unity with the intention of living there for a year and refinancing. Some in the forum have said that refinancing out of the loan is not that easy after a year. I believe one contributor said it is not possible unless the home has 20 to 30% equity. Is there anyone that has gone through NACA and got a multi-unit and was able to successfully refinance out of the loan after a year, or is it more realistic to plan to have to stay in the home for 3 to likely 5 years? I couldn't exactly tell by reading the qualifications handbook, but it seems that there are some stipulations in being able to sell and refinance out of NACA that may not make it as easy as simply refinancing the property. Can anyone shed any light on this or share their experience with buying a multi-unit with NACA and later refinancing out of the loan?

Thank you.

Does anyone know if you can refinance a NACA loan after a year without having to pay the 25k lien put on the property and also doe that release you from the occupancy requirement?

Thanks for all of the advice/comments everyone.

Al

@Russell Brazil,

I understand your point about DTI, but I was thinking more about the fact that we would exhaust a significant part of our savings to buy the multi-unit first and would likely have to save extensively for a couple of years in addition to what we might cash flow from the multi-unit to have enough to buy our single-family home next.

Okay, I am going to try and make this non convoluted. My wife and I sold our condo at the hight of the market, and we are currently staying with family. While saving for a house. We have a substantial amount saved, and instead of buying a single-family home, we thought it would be a good idea to do a house hack for a year in a multi-unit as a way to enter the investing space and then buy our single-family home. We were thinking about going FHA for the multi-unit. We were looking in Baltimore City, Maryland.

My concern is that with a low FHA down payment, the monthly mortgage amount is going to be higher than it would be at 20%, and even when we get tenants in the units, the cash flow will be fairly small. Though the down payment and closing costs will not be huge, they will eat up a sizable portion of our savings. I am concerned that, even with the money we would save from the other tenants paying our mortgage, as well as what we would get in monthly cash flow, it is still going to take us a while to save the money we would need as a down payment for the single-family home that we wanted to buy after we bought our first investment property.

We only wanted to house-hack for a year, but if we do that first, it seems that it will be a good while before we can actually save up again to get into a single-family home.  I know we can go as low as 5% down on our single-family home, but the trade-off there is a much bigger monthly payment. We have about 120K in savings.  

Now, I am trying to think of the best course of action to take. Should we go for the single-family home first or go with the house hack first?  I hope this was not too confusing; does anyone have any advice about what to do here? There could be solutions or options that I have not thought about or should consider. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts.  Thanks-Al

Are there websites that will give me the current rental rates for 2, 3, or 4-bedroom units in the different parts of Baltimore City, Maryland?

Are there websites, that will giving me the current going rental rates for 2, 3  or 4 bedroom units in the different parts of Baltimore city Maryland?

Everyone talks about how 99% of the multifamily homes in Baltimore City are not legal. Is this true and does that mean as a new investor I should stay away from those units? I don't want any legal drama. How can I check to see if the unit is illegal not?

I notice on some sites like Redfin, Zillow and others they are sometimes classified as multifamily homes. Would these sites knowingly misrepresent the home's true classification? Thoughts on this would be much appreciated.