All Forum Posts by: Bobby Nilsen

@Dana A.

I am an investor in the South Bay. We buy from Gilroy to SF to Sacramento. About 95% of our purchases are on the peninsula. Shoot me a message, would love to chat about how we can work together. 

@Nate R.

Awesome of you wanting to grow and learn. I’m always up for chatting real estate and helping out if I can. Shoot me a message and we can chat. To make money in real estate you need one of three things, time to contribute towards deals/investors, deals, or money. With one of those and drive you can get started no problem.

@Casey Walker santos

Yes it’s more than enough. Just bought a property in the SF Bay Area with less than that. Depends on what you want to do. What are your goals, wholesaling, rehabbing, buy and hold, etc. Depending what your risk appetite is you can make that money work for you.

@Paul Kubin As most say California is crazy, stay away deals are overpriced, if it's hit the mls there's no chance you'll get something that cash flows unless you put 50% down. Those statement are just not true. The Bay Area is a different type of beast compared to most of the country, awesome cash flowing properties are much tougher to find but when you do, they're ten times better than 90% of the other properties out there. We just bought 3 properties off the MLS in the South Bay that will all cash flow with little to no money into them.

But to answer your question, no it's not hard, you have to be persistent and show the agent that you are a real buyer. There are a lot of investors and other "real buyers" that waste a lot of agents time. Be real and up front about yourself and they can never tell you that you are wasting their time. Finding your deal will take a little bit of time on your end, a property probably won't fall in your lap even if you get on an agents MLS notification system. If one does you'll have to act quick and diligently because there are ten others who can act quicker that are waiting to buy it if its a great deal. Please reach out if you'd like, always love chatting about real estate.

I’m not sure about the other parts of the country but in the SF Bay Area the ability for an investor to scale their business may rely on the agents. For us we used agents to scale our business. Very few deals come from the court house steps, mailers, driving for dollars, etc. I’m not saying deals don’t come from those methods but definitely not the amount that come from agents.  We have well over 10k realtors, a lot of them are marketing and they are going to continue to market. If you reach out to 100 agents who continually reach out to 5,000 homeowners a month, much better scaling like that than on your own. Getting deals straight from homeowners happens much less in the Bay Area than other states and maybe even other parts of California. I still think whether they are savvy or not using an agent as a new investor is a great tool. We purchase about 80% of our inventory from agents and of that about 10% is most likely from agents who don’t know what they are selling. Scaling a business doesn’t come down to using an agent or not, it’s whether or not the investor can and wants to scale. Real estate agents are a powerful beast, don’t fight the beast and go at it alone, work with them and it will only benefit you. 

@Jorge Vazquez

One could flip that and say investors should buy from realtors who don’t know how to price investments. The realtors who don’t know how to calculate the cap rate, grm, etc. price them not knowing the true price. The property will be over priced, sit and then an investor can come in and talk reality to the agent and get it for a better price, just did this with two multifamily properties in the SF Bay Area. Or the property will be so well priced if your able to snag it you’ll get a smoking deal. Know how to run your own numbers and it doesn’t matter what others can or can’t do. There is only one person who can make your investment decision and no one else has the power to make you buy a bad or great deal. Have done great on a lot deals and horribly red on a few. Those few were strictly my fault and no one else’s. Use everyone and determine their strengths and weaknesses to benefit the situation.

@Kim Hud Not sure if the units have laundry in them but that would be more ideal than coin op to get higher rents. My guess is gas and electric have their own meters and water is on a master meter. If you are able to implement RUBS that would help offset the increased water expense for water.

Hi @Roland Amparo The more money the better of course, then your ability to close is a reality vs needing to wholesale your deals. The first deal we came to the table with cash, $315k, we scraped everything we had to make this one work. We could of financed it with about $50k and we would have still made money just minus about $4k-$5k. After that we have mainly leveraged ourselves. Within six months of that first deal, right after the 4-plex, we leveraged ourselves to about $22M in holdings with about $100k in holding costs a month. We went all in. If you're flipping you will of course need more money and then it depends on which market you are in for how much you need. Wholesaling, you can get away with nothing but having money to market is best, that just comes down to what you want to spend. If you have the hustle you can build an empire with nothing, but it'll be a grind and you will have to put in the work. 

@Nick Mess

When you start getting serious about it or when it makes financial sense look into section 179.

@Joel Owens

@Charles Kao

Thanks for your heads up on dealing with commercial agents. Typically when we get in touch with any agent the first thing we do is qualify ourselves with our current holdings. If they check they'll see we have somewhere around $10-20M in market value of properties, with about $7M or so in multifamily. I'm not a wholesaler asking for a commercial list to blast to try and wholesale more deals. What we are looking for is commercial office space around 5k SqFt in the San Jose area for our company. We are just starting to break into the commercial space and any help would be greatly appreciated. As most commercial properties in this area are sold off market what are your guys' idea to get in touch with the commercial agents to be on the forefront of their minds?