All Forum Posts by: Chris Derbyshire

I'm planning on doing the same thing. renovating the main house now then moving to the DADU.

You can rent everything out without living on the property. But the max occupancy of the property is 12 people. there are also some min lot size requirements and max DADU size requirements and if you are building the property's second ADU you need to conform to some more requirements. The link here offers a lot of helpful tips, https://www.seattle.gov/DPD/Pu...

If you convert the DADU to a detached condo however the DADU no longer counts towards the 12 person limit and if you like you can sell it separately from the main house or even hold it and pull a HELOC.

Hey fellow Washingtonians! You're right! its so expensive! I'm super new so please take some grains of salt with this. I like you also have a day job that I wanted to be close to but still purchase my first property. I found south Seattle, Renton and Burien to have a few gems. I got my first house hack and closed not two weeks ago for 80k under market or ~150k under after renos. Its just cosmetic updates (from what I can tell now) but I found it before the seller posted to the MLS and I think that's the trick. Network, check craigslist, Facebook, etc. but once it hits the MLS in Seattle metro it's going to be priced very high and still have lots of offers to compete with.

Good Luck!

Hey there! I'm a construction manager with a degree in civil engineering, we see this literally all the time, especially in heavy freeze thaw areas and it looks like you have snow on the ground. Fun fact about concrete at the bottom of the beam, it's not nearly as important as you'd think, the rebar is carrying the load. Yours looks like its in good shape but you need to check a couple things. First is deflection, use the other side to compare to. Check the elevation of the corner and the middle to get the deflection of the good side then do the same to the spalled side (use a rotary laser, ground might not be flat). They should be pretty close (+/- 1" max). Next check for cracking. Your eyes aren't good enough to do this (no ones is), buy a $5 crack card and check the widths and length of the cracks. 0.006" to 0.014" is normally fine but fill them in with epoxy to prevent rusting and water freezing and expanding in there again. Anything over 0.014" is concerning but a carbon fiber wrap should help. Cracking should stop at the mid point of the beam (that's where the concrete goes from tension to compression in most cases). If you have compression cracking you may need to replace the beam (cracking above the mid point).

When you get a contractor to fix it make sure they drill and dowel some #3s or at the very least some forming spikes with tie wire strung between them, you need something for the patch to grab onto otherwise it'll just fall off in a year or two. Also have them apply a bonding agent, Sikadur32 is great. 

Good Luck!

Investment Info:

Small multi-family (2-4 units) buy & hold investment in Seattle.

Purchase price: $626,000
Cash invested: $30,000

My first one! $700k appraisal and haven't started reno yet! soon to have 3 units (~1.5k/mo projected net)
renters to follow main house renos and I'll move the the smaller MIL

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

Dad has a SF and the podcast helped a lot

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

Was FSBO on craigslist from an investor looking to retire and gain more work life balance

How did you finance this deal?

Conventional 5% down, 2.50%-30yr fix
house hack

How did you add value to the deal?

renos to the main house, mil will be done this year
2 story garage can be easily converted to a 2b2ba

Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

Sound CU is super helpful for a newbie
shelly answered all my questions no mater how basic or complex in a way that was easy to understand

I know Zibo is supper new but I'm on the home stretch of closing on my first property (3500sf dup and soon to be renoed to a 4500sf triplex) in Seattle and it looks like Zibo might be a solid solution to managing expenses easily. It's free for everyone like Cozy but it has a seemingly robust expense tracker that'll be able to code expenses to different properties and categories to then export to excel for the cpa at the end of the year. Comes with the option for an almost 5% FDIC insured savings and checking, will keep track of the deposits (including interest owed to tenant if applicable), and they say they're about to release an app too. Maybe a bit too good to be true?