All Forum Posts by: Brian Kelley

I'm going to piggy back on this post because it is current and I have the same basic question.  I am interested in getting my license to help with access and ease in making offers.  I seriously doubt I would do any any work as a buyer/seller agent on a deal I wasn't part of.  This is also Washington State.

The broker my agent works for says he is happy to host me as a new agent and is fine if I don't bring much appreciable traffic to the office. He does want about $250 every 6 months for MLS access and about $100 a month for E&O insurance. He said he would be willing to give me 60% of any commissions to start and said seasoned agents generally get 70%.

Are these in the ballpark of standard costs?  I'm not looking to shop around to save every penny but by my math, it will cost me around $1,700/yr to hang my license on the wall not counting any State fees or continuing education.  If that is standard, so-be-it.  Thanks for any thoughts or insights.

Thanks for the responses so far. I was planning to put her on the loan because I presumed it would be required to qualify for owner occupied rates. She will be transferring with her associates degree as a Junior so she can skip the dorms. There should be two years of undergrad and 2-3 more to get her DVM (Veterinarian).  So the timeline should work for some modest appreciation too. 

Hello BP!  I'm getting back in the game after being away for a while and part of my timing is the kids are leaving the nest.  One of them is planning to attend WSU in Pullman WA which is a little college town surrounded by a few million square miles of summer wheat...

Room and board is almost as big an expense as tuition and it always made sense to me to consider purchasing a house for the student to live in for a period of years while renting out extra rooms to classmates.  I know students are not always the most gentle tenants but let's assume for a minute that they don't trash the place completely or if they do, they burn it to the ground and the insurance agent writes me a check.  But I digress...

The cheapest money out there are owner-occupied residential loans.  Would it be possible for my daughter and I to buy a house together as an owner-occupied if I wasn't living there?  3% down and 4% fixed makes the potential numbers look fantastic when you consider the room-rents coming in on the rest of the house.  To be clear - I'm not attempting any fraud here.  I'm curious if owner occupied must be maintained (for a year) by both/all parties on the mortgage or just one of them.

My daughter is just now 18 so she has no credit to speak of but she does have some nice income from two part time jobs.  I'm not sure how much of a monkey wrench her lack of credit history is going to have on the process so I'll need to check with a bank at some point too.

I'm looking at options for buy and hold house hack 3 and 4 plexes for me closer to home that would happen in conjunction.  My income and credit are great and debt to income after I sell our current house would probably support all of this without factoring rents so in short, 'is this possible'?  Thanks for this and for everything on the site.  If anything like BP existed 15 years ago when I liquidated the first set of rentals, I'm sure I would have made them work!

I would be interested!

This is over my head for sure but there are some really nice opportunities like this around Seattle.  Good luck with your journey.  I hope to have pockets deep enough to swim in your end of the pool one day!

Hello everyone!  I'm excited to be here and can't wait to learn and contribute to the community.  Here's some backstory:

I'm a 40-something single dad of two daughters age 20 and 18.  Back when they were little, I had a small real estate empire growing that included 12 rental units on 4 properties but I had to burn it all to the ground (or liquidate I guess...) to get a safe distance from their mom.  Now I'm ready to get back into it.

I ended up at a free guru seminar in Tacoma last month and didn't take the bait but it did jump start my interests. Last time I did this, there wasn't any such thing a Google so I gave that a try. Would you believe they have forums for everything these days - even REI? It turns out my hobby and primary personal interest is building and racing cars and I moderate one of the car forums so I should have known this was possible. What a wonderful world!!!

I'm planning to split my focus between flipping and rentals - likely depending on what works best for the property.  I have already decided I don't want to be a landlord long term.  I have a good, steady day job for now that allows some flexibility with my schedule so I can manage some of the rehab personally.  I've built most of my own house myself which is both an asset and liability in the flipping game.

It would be very easy for me to buy a fixer and spend 6 months fixing it myself with the occasional day labor helper.  What I need to keep in mind, is the cost of burning 6 months not paying somebody to get the same work done in 6 weeks could be the difference between a good deal and a bad deal.  It is going to be hard for me to hire things things out but I know I need to.  My nature is to DIY everything...

Thanks for reading and for hosting this great site.  I look forward to meeting some of you and to sharing more and more of my experiences - hopefully more good than bad - as time goes on.  If you are in Seattle and want to grab lunch, I think my contact is available in my profile.  Cheers!!

Was your contract subject to inspection?  If so, you simply didn't like the results of the inspection and you can move on.  Did the agent state their was earnest money when there was not?