All Forum Posts by: Bart Bielski

Wow, Im surprised by how many people cared to bother with this thread. First, I would like to thank you all for taking the time to post insightful and thoughtful messages. I genuinely appreciate it, and its very encouraging knowing that this community is so helpful.

As many of you alluded to I think the best course of action would be for me to be patient and continue to go to school. Strive to get a good W-2 job and begin house-hacking and building out a rental portfolio. 

In the meantime while I am in college I will focus my free time on engaging with the REI community through meetups, the forums and volunteering my time to learn. In an ideal world, I would connect with a RE developer and volunteer a few hours a week running errands in hopes to gain more insight into the development world. Im not sure if its wishful thinking but I think a real estate career in development would be really fulfilling to me. I think it may be because of my few summers working in the building trades I became very prideful of my work and enthusiastic about the idea of taking a bare piece of land and constructing it into a building.

Feel free to comment your opinions.

Again thank you all for the encouraging messages.

(P.S Incase anyone is wondering what I am majoring its Computer Science with an emphasis is Information Security. I know its pretty unrelated to real estate but I enjoy it.)

Bart Bielski  

Hello all,

I've been listening to the bp podcast for about 2 years now, essentially just for entertainment and an understanding of REI. However, recently Ive decided to try and take more actionable steps to get involved in the industry. Beginning with signing up on bp, joining wholesale list and analyzing deals, and the next step would be to get out and begin networking. Now, I believe these are great steps i'm taking in order to become more involved however, if I want to seriously get involved in REI I need to find a way to get directly more involved in deals. With that said there are two obstacles preventing me from doing so:

1) An Overall Inexperience in REI

2) No funds to fund deals (Obviously 20 y/o college student)

So this essentially means I need to get creative and find other ways to provide value to other investors in order to get involved. So I've came up with two ideas so far to get involved:

1) Driving for dollars finding deals.

2) Considering my experience working summers for various contractors perhaps I can become a sub contractor and help other investors with their rehab projects.

What other ways could I get involved? Or better yet, what skills do you guys as investors see a lack of in the industry that maybe I can focus on, and provide value in that way? 

Thanks,

Bart B

@Jay Miller- Hey congrats on the first purchase!

I my self just recently joined BP recently hoping to get into real estate investing.

However, as of right now i'm attending college and working part-time for a custom cabinetry company for the past 4 years. So Ill try to provide you some insight into your cabinet dilemma. 

1) First, as mentioned earlier I do not recommend you try to refinish your cabinets yourself. Unless, you have the time, patience and proper tools to do so. With that said if you do decide to tackle this project yourself feel free to reach out to me and ask me more questions.

2) Second, as far as the quotes for the replacements i'm assuming these are priced for China made cabinets, and therefore i'm uncertain of the quotes accuracy (As I only make custom cabinets) but they seem to be to awfully inaccurate. However, some of the reviews i've heard from other fellow contractors on china made cabinets have been mixed but it seems to be a general consensus not to go with the cheapest cabinets.

Again, feel free to pm me and send me pictures of the kitchen and id be happy to discuss further in detail to help you out.  You can also check out specialtywoodworking.com (the company I work for) to check out some of the work I've contributed to.