All Forum Posts by: Brian Pham

@Summer Timms --- @Joe Norman is absolutely right...Baltimore is a city of many neighborhoods, more than your typical city. My partner and I are just beginning our REI ventures here in Baltimore, but I grew up here and lived in over a dozen neighborhoods -- good and bad. Happy to share any informal insights on any neighborhoods when you get to that point.

@Ray Johnson - Thanks for the warning on credit cards...definitely didnt think about the DTI ration impact on the exit. The transition from Hard Money to Refinance to Conventional is something I'm really worried about.

@Nghi Le - Awesome insights, thank you so much. I found a hard money lender in Baltimore that does 90% LTV, 75% ARV, and 95% rehab. I will definitely use the BRRR calc instead of Rental calc, thanks again! I need to dive deeper into all the quick rules (eg 1% rule, 50% rule, etc) so I can truly have it as a reference when analyzing deals.

@Morgan Jones - just curious if you were able to setup a structure for an investor to help you grow? If so, would you be willing to share with me here or on a DM? My wife and I are looking at buying our first rental and we have one investor, so we're trying to find the most fair structure to setup. Thanks in advance for your help!

If you live in a house with your spouse....FHA loan is under their name.... could you get an FHA loan for a 3 unit, rent 2 units long term, and keep 1 unit with your name on it as the tenant and rent it our short-term through AirBnB? Or is this illegal?

@Virgilio Garcia -- did you ever find out if as a married couple, if you each can both have 1x FHA loan even though you live together?

I am looking at a single family row home in Baltimore (21211) and just used the Rental Property Calculator.

Can anyone give me some feedback to see if I am missing anything?

A few specific notes/comments:

• We have $50k cash, so we're considering doing a hard money loan to minimize out of pocket costs so we can maybe buy 2-3 properties to rehab, refi, hold....is this unrealistic with $50k cash and credit cards for rehab costs?
• We have one person interested in living in the property to help manage day-to-day while renting other 2 rooms -- their rent will likely be discounted
• We would do a light rehab ourselves

I loved Brandon's IFTTT tip. I use IFFTT, but never thought about this application.

Once you get the spreadsheet working, a great add would be to add another column that auto creates Google Map links for a quick click & go. To do this, I added another column in the spreadsheet with the following equation (assuming the address is in A2)

=hyperlink("http://maps.google.com/?q="&A2)

This creates a Google Map URL based on what is in A2. I tried this with some to all of the address information and it works most of the time...only time it really doesn't work is when there's limited address info with duplicate addresses as a possibility.

See a working version of this in the screenshot below.

I love anything I can hack together in a (Google) spreadsheet!  #spreadsheetnerd

cc:@Elliot Lamson  @Sean Dolan  @Brandon Turner