All Forum Posts by: Amanda Hensley

In today's market, and in my experience, really good agents will want you to show that you have the financials to execute on any offer(s) you make.  So I would talk to lenders first, get a sense of their guidelines and how well you would qualify for what you're trying to do (you can estimate some things), and then after that, talk to realtors. This way you can say to them, I've talked with such and such lenders and give them more serious info.  

Maybe this is area-specific and your location is different, but I have found that you often have to write an offer on a multi unit property first, subject to interior inspection.  This is supposed to prevent tenants from being unnecessarily convenienced and show the seller that you are a serious buyer, because you will have worked out all the price (and some of the financing) stuff.  

Welcome to BiggerPockets!  Lots of good info and good people here - there are a ton of resources available for you here as well.  

As long as your Debt-to-income ratio is under your bank's limits (and that can very, but generally under 44/45% debt-to-income) then I do think some lenders will let you use a secured loan like a HELOC for the down payment, maybe not all of them. I was able to use a HELOC from rental #1 to pay the down payment and closing costs of rental #2.

I would imagine that a cash out refi would be slightly more favorable, but then you have to pay higher closing costs, so you will want to consider that.  

I am not certain I would personally be comfortable with using my primary residence as funds/collateral in this manner.  If somehow the deal goes south and you end up losing, you could lose your house!  While that is an extremely unlikely scenario, it might keep me up at night.  But everyone's level of risk is different.

What's the appraised value of your rental?  Can you access any equity there? That would be my first option to try, before I looked at my primary residence....

Good luck!  I'm really enjoying this thread, lots of good ideas,  I hope you get it rented very quickly!!

I just did this for a rental we own in East TN.  I used a local (to the house, not to me) bank, where I had an excellent relationship.  It was no problem to get approval for up to 85% of the current appraised value.  

Welcome!  I'm also in the Portland metro area.  You're in a great place for research and networking.

Nice work!!

Interesting, I had ZERO problems getting a HELOC on my rental property in East TN. It was through a local bank where I have a great relationship, so maybe that's the difference. But they loaned me up to 85% of the appraised value...

I use two things to analyse my deals: 1) the 50% rule (it's explained/debated heavily here, I recommend looking it up in the search and reading all you can about it and 2) J Scott's SFR Rental analysis spreadsheet which is available to download from here in the Files section. I think it will work OK for small multis although it's geared towards SFRs

There are numbers you'll need to plug in which you can mostly get from internet research (property taxes, insurance estimate, rents, vacancy rates) local to your area.

The best thing for me was to practice that analysis well before I was ready to pull the trigger on anything.  I've run hundreds of potentials through those analysis steps, and it really helped me see what was a deal/what wasn't (Not to mention including the subjective criteria for school systems, location, etc, etc)