All Forum Posts by: Anton Ermolaev

Due to the hurricane, DFW is planning to provide shelters for over 10 000 people from Houston. Do you think, that will have any significant effect on rental/purchase prices in DFW area?  

Thanks guys for your feedback. Really appreciate this. Those who are saying that technologies will never provide an absolutely correct rental prices definitely have a point. As a serial IT entrepreneur and RE investor, I was interested in existing scientific approaches for the last 4 months. We are trying to develop some AI algorithms in my company at the moment(like, our robots can analyze the pictures and say, wether an interior is "nice" or "not nice"). But, we are still far away from being accurate. Some houses just don't fit into any formal rules we have at the moment. Again, thanks a lot. Your feedback helped to clear up that the issue is harder than we thought

@Dustin Beam Yeah, gambling is a correct word:) Especially for fixer upper. Well, trying to find some AI tool. That's so strange, there are not a lot of tools for rental comps over there. I understand, that it is impossible to do rental comps online, without seeing the property, but, there still are some decent ways to do that

@Account Closed Right. But, I need to buy a house and rent it out. I know a lot of buyers, who never rent their house out, so, they have no idea, what is it's typical rent. As an agent, do you work with investors? Do they call buyers for comps or do you provide them with some investment tool?

Thanks. Rentometer is fine, but, it is not giving detailed explanation of why the price is like that. Sometimes, it is pretty inaccurate, unfortunately. 

Realtors I was working with were running rental comps "manually" based on MLS data. Are there any tools integrated into matrix of other software for agents which does that automatically(using Artificial intelligence algorithms, for instance)?

Since Zillow discontinued it's support for rental comps analyzer, I am wondering, what tools are available out there? 

How do you run your comps?

Greetings,

I am a software engineer from eastern Europe, who is currently on H1B visa. I am living in US for 2 years and tired of renting. Want to start building equity. I am going to buy a townhome in the great community, I would enjoy living in. It's a 2 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom house for $260k. The problem is that, I can go back home or move to another state/city any time, so, my initial plan was rent out the house if I will need to leave Dallas, so that, it would, at least, pay by itself(0 or small positive cashflow is fine). Also, I am having a friend who is seeking for a room in my area. So, I thought, it would be great, if I could rent him out a second bedroom while living in the first one. Currently, I have only 5% downpayment, so, I was thinking about FHA. After talking to my mortgage broker and reading a lot of articles over the Internet, I found out, that nothing of that is possible: I can't rent out neither a room nor the whole house. Selling townhouse if I will need to move to other location is not an option as well because I will lose a lot of money on closing costs and agent fees.

Then I was thinking about converting it into conventional loan. After some research, I found out, that it's possible. So, here are my questions:

1) What are the requirements, costs and time to convert(refinance) from FHA to conventional? Will PMI be gone after conversion?

2) What do people usually do, if they bought a house on FHA and they need to move to different city/state?

3) Can't I really rent out the room to my friend while I will live in the house? Is this really a FHA loan violation? If so, how would they(banks, government) know, that he is living with me? I was renting a room in Chicago when I just moved to US and, I pretty sure, no one knows, that the house owner rent me a room.

Thanks in advance for your answers

Thanks a lot for all your suggestions. 

I am not sure whether I want to go with FHA(5% down) because of the cost of PMIs here in Texas. Obviously, it depends on the cashflow, that the property will produce. Buying a multifamily that will allow me to live there "for free" is definitely something, I would be happy to have.

Will definitely start looking for the opportunities on the market.

Thanks, again

Hello,

I am about to start my real estate journey, but, having some dilemma I would like to share with you. 

I am an IT architect from Dallas, TX with a salary way over $100k. I am renting a gorgeous apartment for $1000 just next to the office and have $30k on my savings account.

I am thinking of buying a house for $100k-$130k. But, because I don't have my own house to live, I can't decide, what my investment strategy should be:

1) Buy the first house for myself and wait till I will have downpayment for the second house, which will be my rental property.

2) Stay in my apartments(keep paying rent) and buy the first house as a rental property.

3) Buy a duplex and live in one half while renting out another one. I believe, that is what Brandon did. Also, this approach is usually recommended in similar threads on this forum. The problem here, is that I don't have enough money for downpayment(conventional loan) for duplex and may need to wait for another 6-9 months to do that. While waiting, I am wasting money on apartment rental.

What will you suggest to do? I believe, majority of you have been in such situation. What did you do?

Thanks in advance