All Forum Posts by: Andy Thoman

My hometown has a big festival every year where many people rent out their houses. I'm thinking of renting mine out, however I would like to take vacation at the same time. Can I rent out my home while I'm out of town? Anything I should be aware of while doing this?

There is a house I am interested in making an offer on. However, before I do, I would like to know how difficult it is to convert it to a multi-family home.

For starters, I already looked it up, and its zoned as multi-family. So would I be forced to convert it if I bought it?

What all needs to be done to convert it? Obviously, each needs a kitchen and bathroom. How do I get different utilities hooked up for each? How do I get it registered as two different addresses? etc.

What can I do myself and what do I need to outsource? 

 How do distant owners usually show the property. This owner lives far away, and it doesn't look like its occupied, so I don't know if there is a property manager. However, the owner has kept up the taxes. It seems like it is something that is just losing him money if its not occupied.

So you would wait to mention any number for an offer until after I've seen the property and talked to the owner?

 I don't have a property that I'm looking to do this on. It is mostly a hypothetical question that I was wondering to help me understand leveraging better.

In the scenario, I'm not asking the seller to give me a mortgage, I'm asking them to act as a private investor to cover the 20%. For two reasons. First, it stops me from needing to put my cash into the purchase. Second, it could motivate the seller to sell at a lower price, because they'd make more money in the long run from the interest payments.

 What was your process of doing this? Did you pay the 20k then get repayed in a couple days?
The thing I don't understand about 2 mortgages, who has the right to foreclosure? If the bank loaned me 80k, then a couple days later I got a loan for 20k on the house, then if I stopped paying, who gets to foreclose? It doesn't seem like the either party, especially the 80k financier would go for this. Or am I missing something that might make this a doable deal?

How do they define what funds are yours?
I don't understand the logic in that though. Why does the bank care? If they're only loaning 80% and they have the right to forclose, it doesn't seem like they have much risk involved.
Are there other agencies aside from banks that might loan the 80% mortgage in this deal?

I was out driving today, and I was just keeping my eyes open to be driving for dollars at the same time.

I saw a house that look abandoned, so when I got home I looked it up. Sure enough, the owner is not from here. So I would like to invest this opportunity further, but I've never done something like this. I have the owners address, phone number, and email from digging I did online.

Here are my main questions:
What is the appropriate way to contact them?
Should I make an loose contingent offer, then go see the property and make a better offer? Or should I just say I'm interested, go see it - then make an offer?
What information should I be checking out for Due Diligence in the meantime?
Are there any good articles on writing a good letter of interest /  phonecall script? Or does anyone know of an example or sample I can look at?
What else am I forgetting that I should keep in mind?

So I know that you can do this, but I'm curious as to how.

If I wanted to buy a house, but didn't want to tie my money up in it so I wanted to ask the seller to finance the down payment, then how would I do this?

For example, if I had a $100k house I wanted to buy with a traditional mortgage with 20% down, but I didn't want to put my own money in it.
So I ask the seller to pay the down payment of $20k, and I'd repay them at 10% interest for to be paid off in 5 years.

First, is this realistic to ask for something like this from a seller? Would a mortgage lender be ok with me doing this?

Also, what would the order of payments be? Here's what I assume: the lender gives the seller $80k and thats it. Then I just pay the seller the monthly payment for the next 5 years on that $20k.

So in the end,  I'd come out with two loans, a 30 year loan for $80k at the mortgage interest rate and a 5 year loan for $20k at the 10% negotiated rate.

My second part of the question is where does the risk fall? If I am unable to pay the payments, I would think that the mortgage lender has the right to forclose on the house. But what right does the seller who financed $20k have if I was not able to pay? Is that just the risk the seller is taking? Or would they have a claim to anything if I stopped paying the loan back?

Or on the flip side, if I wanted to pay the $20k early, would that be ok in an average deal like this?

A final part of my question, how would one ho about doing this deal? Would a real estate attorney be able to take care of all of this, are there agencies specific to this type of work?

How do I find out the laws around wholesaling?

I'm interested in getting into REI. And I figured if I dive enough into it, then I'm bound to find properties that I don't have the cash for or don't want to spend the time finding financing so I want to be prepared to wholesale if needed.

I'm in Wisconsin, how do I find out what I can and cannot do in my state? Does anyone know from experience?