All Forum Posts by: Brian Cashman

We are putting our first house on the market in a couple of weeks. Our house is only 2 years old in a newly developed neighborhood. The front yard is landscaped but the back yard is not. The back yard has no grass (lots of weeds) and has a steep incline. We had plans to spend around 10k for retaining walls and landscaping but then made the decision to sell. Besides picking up and weed eating (which we will do regardless), our question is how should we present it to sellers without affecting profitability?

A. Spend a couple hundred dollars on bark, lay that on the flat areas with a weed mat and plant wild flowers on the hill, making it more easy on the eyes.

B. Present it as a clean slate to the seller so they can develop it however they want and not have to haul out a ton of bark, obviously making the backyard less attractive.

We are in a very hot market and houses are typically going for 30-40k over asking.

Thank you for you input!

My wife and I are newbies and looking to purchase our first investment here soon. We both work in the area. Would love to connect as well!

@James Timmins hey James! I am a Nurse Manager in oregon. Usually agency contracts are for a minimum of 3 months. There seems to be a shortage of nurses going on right now with COVID effecting the output of newly graduated nurses and pushing people into retirement early. Or at least that’s the case in oregon. We have seen job positions stay open with no applicants which is something we have never had an issue with, forcing a lot of units to hire traveling nurses. Also since traveling nurses make a lot more money then regularly staffed nurses I don’t anticipate you’ll have an issue keeping it rented out.

We had never heard of this before! We will definitely look into that 🙂

Thank you for taking the time to reply and your advice!

Well we bought it in early 2019 but it was brand new. No we have not looked into short term leasing - that’s a good idea! Does that mean that if normally we would charge 2200 per month that would increase it to more like 2500?

Our interest rate is 2.5%. Regarding the cash out refinance - isn't that only 75-80% of the ARV. The house is estimated at $408,000 currently and we owe $328,000 putting us right at 80% of value

Thank you so much for taking time to reply we will take any help we can get 🙂

We included 5% for both CapEx and Repairs and Maintenance and 8% for vacant. Based on the calculator it says we would have a cash flow of $6 a month 😖. And that's with us managing the property ourselves. Do you still think it's better to hold?

The house down the street with the exact same floor plan sold for 430k. Which is 92k more than what is owed on our house currently. Our main goal is to start investing in multiple properties. We are open to any advice, thank you for taking the time to respond.

Heres a link to the worksheet. https://www.biggerpockets.com/... 

Hello Fellow BiggerPocketers!

We are new to investing and are looking to take our first step, but need help on the direction we should go! 

Here's the situation:

We currently own a house and our loan is $320,000 but the house is appraising at about $400,000+. Our monthly mortgage is $1900 with rental comps at $2300. It was built in 2018 so brand new and we still have warranty on a majority of the house (siding 10 year, roof 15 years, foundation 15 years). Right now we have no money saved due to paying off debts but are able to start saving $2500 a month from this point forward. Do we:

A. Sell the house and take the $60,000+ in capital to go towards a buying a house hack and a out of state BRRR. We would take a FHA loan with 3.5% down for a house hack in our area and then using the rest of the capital to BRRR out of state due to our market being very high.

or

B. Keep our house and rent it out since we already have equity and will be getting $300+ in cashflow each month. Then rent until we can take another loan out/save up money for a house hack. Keep in mind that while our house is new, we have an unfinished backyard that has a large slope. So in order to make it usable we will need to put in about $10,000 to redo it. 

 So if you have ideas, thoughts, input, opportunities, we'd love to hear them. Thank you!