All Forum Posts by: Amanda Kuhl

Good Morning, there are a few properties in the Harrisburg area that interest me and I am trying to get more information than what is on Realtor.com.  Unfortunately,  I rarely, if ever, get return phone calls from list agents.  I am looking for an agent who can be a strong partner on my first PA investment purchase.  Ideally, I'd like to establish a long term relationship.  I plan to be there in the next few weeks but can't imagine getting showings set up if I can't even get a call back.  

Where can I find a resourceful, responsive RE agent in the Harrisburg area?

Thanks,

Amanda

Hi Jay,

We were unsure of the market value because of the lack of comps we could find and GEG's insistence that we didn't need an appraisal - they had done all of the work for us with their pre-approval process. 

We also didn't like the balloon payment. It was presented as a way to get a better rate (5%) and GEG said it was customary to sell the property before the balloon payment came due which might be an option. But not knowing the appraised value of the property makes it difficult to think ahead to what we might sell for.  Anyone can argue that the lenders wouldn't lend on over valued properties but they didn't really have much skin in the game.  They were getting 50% down, 5% on the principal and balloon payments every 8(?) years so if a handful of loans went belly up it wasn't much of an impact.

As I said, an experienced RE investor might have better insight and therefore more confidence in how it all works.  We loved that they made the whole process so easy to invest in a SDIRA (one of my 2017 goals for is to navigate non-recourse lending per my recent blog post here www.timemoneyandchoices.com ) but we had too many doubts to make it right for US. 

I see a lot of people on BP asking about GEG.  If anyone with a different experience reads this please post.  I'd love to hear what worked for you.  I said several times that Justin French, CEO, was great to work with.  I encourage anyone interested in GEG to do their own research and contact the company directly for more information.  Best of luck everyone!

I recently got pretty far down the path of investing with GEG and opted out of it for several reasons.  We worked directly with the CEO Justin French and he was easy to work with and answered most of our questions very quickly. We backed out because there were too many details we didn't feel comfortable with but we are first time RE investors.  So, someone with more experience than us might check them out and move forward.  If you decide to take a deeper dive with GEG, I suggest you ask the following or research in other ways:

Find out their current connection to Brett Immel who was recently indicted on a mortgage fraud case.

Ask specifically about the pre-approvals they get from their lenders. We were told that the lender had already issued a preapproval and that the appraisal was unnecessary. We asked repeatedly for the name of the lender. When we finally got the name we realized it wasn't a non-recourse lender bank (like NASB), but an LLC formed with private investors for the purpose of funding these projects. So, buyers (like you and me) put 50% down on properties with balloon payments and all without an appraisals. We know an agent in FL and she checked comps for us and the few we found were inconsistent.

Make sure you get copies of the rental contracts.  Every year a tenant renews the rent goes down slightly.  I can see the value in keeping good tenants but that is something that should have been disclosed to us.  We had to specifically and repeatedly ask to get the contracts. 

Finally, beware of getting pushed into a deposit too quickly.  They wanted the whole transaction wrapped up in days (like the non-refundable deposit) and we felt rushed. They said it was that these LAST TWO condos had been pulled out of inventory for us and we needed to move quickly or they would be released to other investors. (fair enough.) We were very clear that we needed more time to review the investment and they obliged. Justin was great about giving us time to come to a decision.

So my point is, it didn't work for us.  It might work for you.  Justin French is very service oriented and was pretty easy to work with.  Good luck with your decision to move forward.  Let us know how it goes.