Investment Info:
Small multi-family (2-4 units) buy & hold investment.
Purchase price: $700,000
Cash invested: $140,000
Bought our first home/investment property. We fixed up the tenant's side and have been living in/remodeling our side slowly for the past 2.5 years. Now we're finished with our side, it looks beautiful, we're refinancing and taking out a HELOC and working to find investment number two!
What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?
My wife and I own a travel company called Coast to Costa. We worked super hard to make the company a success and in 2015 Cuba opened up, giving us a few amazing years. We’d always wanted to buy a house but wanted to house hack (we didn’t know it was called that) to keep our expenses down. With this downturn, I began reading a ton of investment and business books and found Bigger Pickets. Now I want to turn our first successful multi family into many many more!
How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?
A woman who came on a trip to Cuba with me was a realtor and was very helpful.
How did you finance this deal?
Traditional 20% down
How did you add value to the deal?
We completely redid the rental side, new kitchen, alliances, bathroom, painted, restored the original hardwood floors until we ran out of money. The our side we’ve been slowly fixing ourselves with some help on the big projects and now both sides are beautiful and ready to rent.
What was the outcome?
The outcome is that we want to do it again. This time we'd get a HELOC and make a bigger budget for rehab and not have to live in a construction site for months on end.
Lessons learned? Challenges?
So many. We were way over budget with the rehab and had terrible people doing it at first. Since then we’ve found great guys. Having spent every dime I ever made was very emotionally taxing for me but now I’ve learned that if done right, we can basically use that initial investment to grab more then refi and the the money back! It’s amazing!
Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?
We have been getting some help from Lee Ripma that we heard on the Bigger pockets podcast. Still putting together the refi and then HELOC on duplex 1 before we can really start getting going!
