All Forum Posts by: Cathy Bourbois

Please call me about this quickly. Selling for a local non-profit that inherited this house. Needs foundation work but its in the Monticello Park Historical District where homes are selling for top dollar. Hadn't even put it up on MLS yet and I already have people wanting to put in offers. Please call me at 210-325-3763.

Thanks Seth

My husband and I are having a detached garage built but we said we would do the painting.  Now I realize that its 19 ft tall at the ends and neither of us likes being on a ladder that tall!  Can anyone recommend someone dependable and reasonably priced?

Thanks,

Cathy

My daughter is a freshman at CSU.  I live in San Antonio.   I threw out the idea of maybe buying a house for her to live in next year and having her rent out the extra rooms to cover the mortgage.  Now she's really interested.  Does anyone have experience with student rentals in Fort Collins?  Is  there a way to make this economically worthwhile versus renting an apartment?  It appears that Fort Collins is restrictive in occupancy rules with their U+2 rules.  Any advice is appreciated.  Thanks

of course you can choose to only pay the buyers agent 2%.  I wouldn't recommend it though. When the vast majority of listings offer 3% to the buyers agent, it makes a buyers agent wonder what else you cheaped out on when you did the flip. The buyers agent will then explain this to their buyers and also likely explain to their buyers that they will need to pay out of pocket the 1% deficit ( assuming the buyers rep agreement says buyers agent will be paid 3%.)

When you interview a brokerage, make sure to explicitly tell them what you intend to do and make sure they will allow it. For example, for liability purposes some firms E&O coverage will not apply if an agent lists their own personal property

Hi. I'd be happy to help you. I'm a real estate agent here in San Antonio. I have a buy and hold property myself.  I also have a few investor clients that I help.  I would agree with what was said about that particular real estate club. Most of the meeting is the same pitch from one month to the next. However, they do have an email distribution group where you can post messages to the membership and people post their deals.  You might want to look into SAREIA and AlamoReia.  Also you can go to meetup.com and find several informal real estate discussion groups.

I have done this through Merril Lynch.  We bought a foreclosure, cleaned it up and turned it into a rental.  We got a 100% loan at 4.5% for the purchase price, but they have a hold on about 30% of the loan value in our investment account.  (20% of the loan value plus a fudge factor to account for the up and down nature of stocks).  They won't take the hold off those assets though until we have paid down that much of the loan. (Doesn't appear to be any way to show that our appraised value has appreciated and we actually do have 20+% equity and drop the hold on assets.) That strategy worked out well for that first rental of ours - a low interest rate with no money down. (although we did have traditional mortgage up front costs).  Unfortunately, I don't have so many assets that I could do this over and over and over.

Hi.  I'm a realtor considering doing my first flip.  Trying to figure out how to best get money to finance it.  My husband and I could get a 100k line of credit against our stock portfolio (4% interest only payment.)  However, that might be enough to buy a property but not enough for the renovations.  I'm wondering if I should go to a small bank or credit union to get a portfolio loan for the rehab costs?  (Husband has excellent credit and income.)  Would like to minimize finance costs, not pull money out of existing investments or go into business with friends for this first flip.

We are located in San Antonio

Any advice is much appreciated.