All Forum Posts by: Brendan M.

You can and will certainly see different lenders have different associated closing costs and rates. I highly recommend shopping around with a number of different lenders, then find the two best and ask each other to beat the other's rate. Their first quote will almost certainly not be the lowest they can go on closing costs. Rates may get locked in so those are trickier. Check out my first blog post in my profile, I actually was able to reduce my closing costs several thousand by doing this.

@Tyrell Anderson has done an A+ job for me so far and I would enthusiastically second that. If you're in the market for an agent, Aaron was also my agent on the last two small multifamilies and there's no way I would have been able to handle those remotely without his help.

Welcome to BP!

@Chris Moshier

Welcome to BP! I was in your same shoes this time last year, and as of last month I just closed on my second multifamily I'm house hacking with a VA loan - you can read about my experience and lessons learned from my first home here. Feel free to reach out with any questions you have or if you just want to bounce some ideas around. It's an exciting journey, and if you're asking questions and networking on BP you're already on the right path.

Yep! I actually had some pretty fortunate timing in that I found and contracted my first home (a 4plex), then PCSed like a week before closing so all I had to do was show up for the final walkthrough and close. Deployed about 2 months after that, which got me out of the 1-year residency requirement and allowed me to contract up on my second home while deployed using my VA benefits again. I wrote a bit about my experience buying my first 4plex in my blog, which you can get to through my profile if you're interested in more details.

@Sharee Mason, no you do not have to sell your old home to reuse your VA benefits. Your eligibility to 100% finance your second home will depend on how your first home is financed for and how much you intend to finance your second place. In most locations, the VA guarantee is $417,000 total, regardless of the number of properties (it can be more in certain high cost of living areas). If your first home was purchased for $200,000 and you put 0% down, you would have $217,000 left in eligibility. This doesn't mean you need to buy a second home for less than that, but you will likely need to put up to 25% down on the difference between your remaining eligibility and purchase price. For example, assuming the above eligibility, if you found a home for $250k you wanted to purchase you would have to come up with 25% of (250k - 217k), or 8.25k, which comes out to something like 3% of the home's total value. 

So depending on your specific numbers, you may or may not be able to get away with 0% down, but if you have any VA eligibility left at all you should be able to get away with less than the typical 20% - how much less really depends on a number of factors. I recommend talking to a mortgage broker about it, they can tell you exactly how much you have left in your VA guaranty eligibility, so you can make the most informed decision.

Alternatively, you can also consider refinancing your old home to free up all of your VA eligibility. Doing a non-VA refinance will likely result in having higher rates, but your full eligibility will be able to be restored. Depending on how much equity you have in the home, you may even be able to lower your monthly payment, resulting in better cash flow.

@James Fox In May I purchased a small multi remotely before I PCSed and I just did another remote purchase using my VA loan while deployed last month. While it's certainly doable, i definitely would have had a much, much harder time if I didn't have a great team of people working with me. Between my agent, my mortgage broker, and my PM, it made the process much easier. If you can find the right people and build a solid relationship, I see no reason you can't successfully invest remotely.

@John Thedford Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it!

This is exactly what I experienced - within two weeks of these tenants moving in, I received disgruntled emails from every single one of the other tenants. Fortunately I've heard less from them since my crazy tenants moved out, but she definitely poisoned the water and there's definitely some lingering damage to the tenant-landlord relationship from all of it. 

Honestly, I think taking on a property manager immediately after this experience not only made things way more manageable for me, but it also had proved to be a great move for tenant satisfcation. Since their only interface is through the PM now, it removed me from the equation and with that I think a lot of their frustrations became out out of sight, out of mind.

Not an expert by any means, but hopefully I can help a bit. The VA Loan Guaranty Program governing documentation can be found here.

I was able to find some applicable information that may help your case. Section 36.4344 LENDER APPRAISAL PROCESSING PROGRAM, part (3) states:

"Lenders that meet the requirements of 38 U.S.C. 1802(d), and have a staff appraisal reviewer determined acceptable by VA, will be authorized to review appraisals and make reasonable value determinations on properties that will be security for VA guaranteed loans."

Further, paragraph (5)(d) of that same section: "Adjustment of Value Recommendations. The amount of authority to upwardly adjust the fee appraiser's estimated market value during the lender staff appraisal reviewer's initial review of the appraisal report or to subsequently process an appeal of the lender's established reasonable value will be specified in the separate instructions issued by VA as noted in 36.4344(b)."

The regulation then goes on in subsequent paragraphs to describe what is required to adjust the price upwards, to include process and required documentation. My interpretation of this would be that if the lender has a full-time staff appraiser, then they can make their own reasonable value determination based off the VA appraisal, which in this case might mean adjusting for 2 stories and a garage. You might be able to work something with your bank on this front.

That said, I didn't necessarily answer your original question, and my answer will ultimately be unhelpful if your lender does not have a staff appraiser. I was unable to find anything mentioning the MLS or anything like it, so I'm going to doubt that there is any hard requirement to use the MLS for appraisals. My guess is that the appraiser himself may have this as a personal guideline to make it easy on himself. However, you may be able to convince the VA to do a second appraisal if you feel like the last guy was questionable.

Hope that helps a little.