All Forum Posts by: Keith Miller

Not a silly question at all, it's far sillier to not ask the question in the first place. 

To try and be helpful, these are the hard money lenders I know personally in Montana, feel free to use my name as a reference.

Juniper Capital- Leslie Laird is my contact there

Pacific Mortgage Center- Becky is my contact there

Pat McGowen- Runs the Bozeman Investor Club

Good luck, let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!

In my opinion, this trend will significantly influence the Missoula Market in the long-term. Especially the last sentence in the article.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/r...

Field trip on Wednesday 3/30, for anyone interested, I'm finishing up two backyard townhouses at 1940 Dixon Ave. A bank-ordered appraisal just came in at $695K, and the build price was only $340K. I'm pretty ecstatic about how the whole project came out. I'll explain how the project went, where we ended up with costs, and what I learned through the process. I'll be bringing a six pack and we will start at 7:15 on Wednesday, 3/30. Depending on numbers and how many people show up, we may relocate across Brooks to the Great Burn Brewery, because the larger of the two townhouses will be occupied with a tenant by then, we'll be in the smaller of the two units.

To find it, please park at the KFC at 3306 Brooks St, then walk the half block to 1940 Dixon Ave, then you can walk to the right of the original house to the backyard. Then, we'll meet in the first of the two townhouses, please just take off your shoes before entering.

Connor McMahon is our speaker this month. Connor has extensive experience as a Commercial Real Estate Agent, and Sterling CRE does an excellent job of gathering current data. He will share current data on the Missoula market across all asset classes, with a particular focus on multifamily.

The Missoula Real Estate Meetup has three main goals:

1. Learn more about the Missoula Market

2. Make authentic connections

3. Share strategies and information

As always, there will be no selling of any products or services, and it's always free to attend.

Zillow is predicting another crazy summer of real estate price increases.

https://fortune.com/2022/03/20...

Good question! I'd start by calling general contractors and builders and ask them for a rough idea of cost per sq ft. You will need a local contractor to be able to tell you that. I can tell you that in Missoula, the costs of building are around $170-230 per sq ft, if you have a cost conscious builder. But that doesn't include any of the significant costs that go into building new apartments, including permits, architects, civil engineers, surveys, etc. I can't give you very specific ideas about what to do with the site, or what other options you have, without additional details. But I can tell you that it would be a 2-4 year-long process to redevelop the site, and you should incorporate demolition costs if you plan on scraping it. A ballpark guess for that would be between $50-100K. 

Hi Tyler! 

Excellent question, I've been debating this myself lately, and literally talking to my wife about this last night. I'll give you my strategy, but I'd love to hear from others about what they're doing. 

I've recently increased the number of my rental units to 6, and have gone back and forth about whether I need 6 months of reserves for every single property. At this point, I personally have just decided to keep a $50K reserve/emergency fund for both my properties and my family. It works out to almost exactly 6 months of reserves for all of my mortgages combined, and is also a nice round number. I personally don't have properties separated out into LLCs, so I don't have specific reserve funds for each. This feels sufficient to me, as I'm also pretty handy and self-manage, and if a bunch of simultaneous repairs were needed, I would like dig in and try to do some of them myself. 

So to answer your question, $100K does seem like a lot for reserves. But at the same time, the wealthier I get, the more important financial stability and security is rather than a simple ROI, so the larger I'll want my reserves to be.

What does everyone else do for reserves? 

I'm personally a buy and hold guy, so my advice would be to hang onto both, and just enjoy the cashflow, debt paydown, and appreciation. Paying off mortgages is nice, don't get me wrong, but by paying off a mortgage you're essentially making an investment with a 4% ROI, which is pretty poor. If you explained you goals I could give you better advice, but the greatest benefits of real estate come from a long-term buy and hold strategy, that's what many investors end up doing in the long run.

If you want you house paid off, you could always direct all of your real estate profit towards that mortgage and slowly pay it off. 

I'd highly recommend the newest BP episode. They finally got around to featuring ADUs and their potential. There were some really good takeaways about what to be looking for to add an ADU. https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-581

Our speaker this month is Josh Plum. Josh is the experienced Broker / Owner of Point 6 Real Estate and Business Development Director for Plum Property Management, which is owned by Jennifer Plum. He will speak to us about the current Missoula market, the strategies he's seeing that are successful, and the pitfalls to avoid that can wipe out your profitability as an investor.

The Missoula Real Estate Meetup has three main goals:

1. Learn more about the Missoula Market

2. Make authentic connections

3. Share strategies and information

As always, there will be no selling of any products or services, and it's always free to attend.

We meet the third Tuesday of every month at the Highlander, at 6:00 PM. We usually have 20-30 attendees.