All Forum Posts by: Rebecca Belnap

I have properties in Lehi and Orem.  Would love to buy more if the deal is right.

Good to meet you.  I live in Lehi, work in American Fork and I am part owner of a duplex and a triplex. Also looking for more.  

Would love to meet up and network to see if we can help eachother.

Welcome to bigger pockets. Southern utah is great, but nothing wrong with tooele either.  I have family in Grantsville that wouldn't live anywhere else.

In utahcounty.gov/landrecords you go to the screen that says property information.  You should see at least 1 picture of the property as well as info like serial number, property address, and mailing address.  If property address and mailing address are different then you want to mail something to the mailing address.

Under owner names it will show a chain of title with the most recent owner on top.  Then do a white pages search for the owner name at the mailing address and you might get a phone number.  It's a lot harder to get a phone number since most people have cell phones and it isn't listed.  Still, worth a try.

Yes, I have done one deal with them.  They did a great job, everything funded as promised.  You are being offered a different deal than I got, they gave me 3 offers with 80%, 90%, or 100% of the purchase price, but nothing for rehab costs.  We ended up with the 80% loan since I had access to private money for the 2nd.

We had up to a year to repay which was nice since it took the pressure off.  Our problem wasn't with them but with ourselves.  It took 10 months to flip the property and interest ate up most of the profit.  I would use them again, but refinance as soon as the house was habitable if find another similar deal.

Welcome to BiggerPockets, It's good to see that you already know what you would be getting into with rentals and still want more.

Fourplexs won't be much harder to manage than you duplex, but they do require 15% down even if you are owner occupying.  That is something to remember in Utah for owner occupying.  Single family can be no money down, duplex can be 3.5%, Triplex and Fourplex are 15%.  The plus on that is that it may not save you that much to owner occupy so if you don't want to move, you don't have too.

Rates are still lower, but it's worth looking at it both ways.

Good luck.

If you were to lock in an Non-owner occupied today, you should count on 4.5% with 25% equity, or 5% with 15% equity.

William is right, 50% expenses would be enormous.  I only have 5 doors at the moment, but even with replacing all the windows in the duplex this year we won't go above 30%. It has taken us 2 years to get all the deferred maintenance from the last owner done, so next year I expect it to be better at about 10 to 15%.  

The plan is good even though as the others have pointed out your numbers are extremely optimistic. If you hold to those numbers it will severely restrict the number of deals you can do and you will be depressed and frustrated before you even find one.

Right now if you look on the MLS, even in the worst areas of provo, houses are going for at least $130,000 and those rent for about $1000 per month. To get a deal that good, you need to have your offer in on day 1. It's still a strong sellers market and they know it. You can do what you are talking about, but you will have to market very heavily and count on the funnel being very slow. 10,000 letters will get maybe 100 responses. Maybe. Those 100 might get you one fantastic deal. Maybe.

With you being new and eager to get deals, it is going to be very hard to not get pushy and frustrated with the sellers.  I'm not saying that it can't be done, but you need to really listen to what the seller needs so you can build that relationship of trust that is necessary for them to sell at that price.

Are you comfortable passing on 10 good deals and 5 really good deals while you wait for the perfect deal? Once you have been doing it for a while it will get easier to hold out for only the best, but at first it is going to be tough.

If you stucture your financing correctly when you buy, there are programs available that will allow you to refinance as soon as your contractor is done and the tenants are in.

Hope it works well for you.

Planning on being there but will leave early.

As an investor who lives in Utah, this is making me laugh and I thought I would share my story about how I first found out about bigger pockets.

After the mortgage meltdown, my husband and I lost all of our properties and had to start over from scratch.  He is a Realtor, so what job is available for out of work Realtors in a depressed Utah market?  Working for the companies that run the call centers for Guru training.

For a year and a half, he provided one on one weekly calls to people who had paid anywhere from $5000 to $50,000 and gave them the same training regardless of what they paid.  There were at least 5 guru's that they would teach for and he had to keep a note up to remind him which name to mention as he talked about "their" techniques.  Two had actual syllabuses, the others didn't so they just used what the others gave them.  Six months into working there, we started a new flip which made him the only person in the department who was actually working as an investor.  Most of his coworkers had only bought their own personal residences and a few had never purchased a property at all.

One day he was asking around for good info about something (a good tutorial on how to calculate a CAP rate, I think) and one of his coworkers pointed him to a link in Bigger Pockets. His supervisor caught him talking to a client about Bigger Pockets and told him that he could look up info there to share with clients, but not to let them know where he got it.

The company went out of business and my husband is back to being a full time Realtor, but don't worry, more companies like it have moved in to fill the void.