All Forum Posts by: Glen Gaidos

I have a question about this. I'm looking into this for my own business. I have found some interesting folks on odesk.com that may fit our needs.

In your experience, do they provide their own telecom solution to make calls, or do you set them up with some sort of desktop VOIP agent software so that they can do outbound calls?

That's the biggest challenge I've seen so far in terms of having someone working on our behalf from outside the US.

Curious how this as worked for you...

Thanks!

Glen

Great, I sent you a colleague request. If you want to email me off-line, I'm happy to pass along the referrals. And if there are any questions I can answer, or go over some of the purchases I've made and the pros and cons, I'm happy to do that...

Hi Steve,

Welcome to BP. Feel free to hit me up with questions. I've done some investing in LV remotely, and it has worked out well (so far!). A lot of work, though, and finding the right team made all the difference for me.

Hi Jeanette,

I've done some investing remotely, and the key to my projects in Vegas, have been finding the right local resources. Two of the deals I found came from my realtor and were off-MLS.

I'm happy to provide a referral if that helps...

Happy Hunting!

Glen

Hi Cyrus,

I'm not in Las Vegas for CES, but have invested remotely, and found some great resources to work with for my investing in Vegas. If you want, I'm happy to put you in contact with them...

Glen

Oh one more thing. Can't say enough about Redfin! Found my resources through them, and also did a lot of my research...Great way to look at MLS data. Also, seems better at comps then Zillow, although comps in Vegas in the last year or so have been wacky and have a wide range, to be sure...

Hi Jessica,

I'm not local to Vegas, but was interested in investing there for a period of time, so did the necessary research, made a trip there and found a team to make the transactions work. All of my purchases were buy and hold.

I'm sure being on the ground there can save you money and give you access to better deals, and if you're interested, I'm happy to refer you to the people I work with.

I have an agent, lender, and property management company there, and everything I've done so far has been hands-off, except for a minimal amount of project management, and researching the deals. Two were short sales, and two were off-MLS. One I found, and the other two came through my realtor. Since it's been a hot market, and I was just getting a handle on it, it felt like the ratio was more like - look at a 200 houses, offer on 20, hope to get 1.

Getting things fairly off-MLS is the key. Anything on the MLS that was a reasonable deal got snapped up by cash investors pretty quickly.

Related to an earlier thread, though, it is possible to do financed deals. All of mine were. Cash is king, for sure, but you may have to be more creative. Short sales in particular seem more immune to the potential effects of cash vs. financed portion of the deal.

One word on condos - it is tougher to get loans, and you have to either do your own or pay to do diligence on the HOA. A lot of outstanding HOA debt, and deferred maintenance can be real issues.

In general, I went with SFRs, and still looked at the financials of the HOAs to make sure they weren't underwater.

Anyway, feel free to hit me up for any more info or referrals. I'm very pleased with the resources I've found.

Happy Hunting!

Glen

Thanks everyone for the insight! Yep, it's all about local economic base when it comes to rental market strength. I was surprised to see how many apartment buildings were on the MLS in Longview, so I thought that might be a sign that these were getting to be a challenge to fill, and even bigger challenge to manage. A few were in good neighborhoods and close to the college, so I thought that was a plus. Anyway, I was there for work, anyway, and did a few drive-bys to get a feel.

Thanks for the lead, too, Michele, it sounds like you've gotten a lot of experience under your belt. I'll check out your book, too...

Hi Everyone,

First post here. I'm from Seattle, but looking at other areas of Washington to potentially invest in, and wondered what experience anyone has in the Longview, WA area. One reason I'm posting is that there are pretty fair number of apartment buildings for sale in Longview on the MLS. Wondering if the some property owners are seeing the writing on the wall and trying to dump properties ahead of some weakening in the economic base. I've looked at some numbers and it seems that employment numbers are going up (slightly), but since I don't live in the area, I can't take too much stock in the numbers.

Thanks, loving the website, and the podcasts, and looking forward to connecting with other members...