All Forum Posts by: Chris Jackson

@Peter Lavetsky  I have been in the Syracuse market for 7 years.

Visions Federal Credit Union is great. Financed me in 2010 when nobody was giving out loans.  

Empower Federal Credit Union is also great, the cash out refi'd my mutli fams in February of this year.

Contact me directly and I will give you a good contact point at the bank. 

Hi @Eddie J. we are very active in the Syracuse market. Check out our SFR portfolio on our site. I direct message'd you. I can give you info

@Jared Vidales   we are very active in the Syracuse market right now.  I direct message'd you 

@Jake Serdar 

1) Step 1 get list of phone numbers

2) Call owner and do something different but be yourself.  Respect their time. Be vulnerable and semi apologetic.  Be professional.

"Hey mr owner apologize for calling like this but I saw that you owned xyz. I am not a broker. I am a direct buyer and I am buying in the area.  I wont waste your time. If you have considered selling your property give me a call as I am looking to buy in the next x months "  (if you have experience reference it. "I own xyz other buildings in the area"

3) Ask @John Cohen - he's a master at this.  John rolls something interesting where offers to tell them what the building is worth but he emphasizes that he is not a broker but the buyer.

@JJ GONZALEZ II  I agree with your line of thinking. But I am not buying at 100k/1000mo on my SFRs.  It goes the other way in both directions.  Much less all in, higher rent then that.

Yes even with the ratios I am buying at you do need access to cash. I am not able to achieve the substantial discounts unless we had cash in hand as well as buying many in a short period of time.  

@Justin Young I wish I could give you an easy answer.  The answer lies in so many combinations of factors. Market, cash access, your strengths and weaknesses, your credit strength, your team's strength.

I started in MF.  Glad I did. I also started when getting a commercial loan was next to impossible and almost needed to colateralize my dog to get the loan, but got it.  In 2009 and 2010 when I look back there were deals everywhere but really hard to get financing.  Now its harder to find true deals but much easier to get financing on an MF property.

In contract on a 56 unit MF now. So I am definitely not saying I am sour on MF.  I just wait for the really really good ones.

@Jennifer Pletcher

We have both types of portfolios.  Picked up 20 SFRs since February this year.  

I tend to overall like MF better but also as a real estate investor you have to look at where the yield is, the market cycle and your own strengths and weaknesses as an investor.

Current MF market cycle means there is a lot of competition.  You just have to know that right now.  So you have to be careful to manage your own criteria and not waver from it, which unfortunately means less deals and more offers to land your deal.

SFRs have their own positives and negatives. I am a fan of SFRs right now but I apply a multifamily lens to them. When we bought our first SFR we did not have the intention of only buying 1 or even 2. In an MF building you are going to have a tenant that stays in unit #2 for 3 years and you are going to have a unit #22 that seems to turn over every year. Your total vacancy risk exposure is mitigated by the average of 30 units where you have winners and losers. This is why I prefer multifamily.

However if you have 20 SFRs you start to see the same pattern. Winners and losers. The average is what you care about. SFR tenants do tend to stay longer though which makes its possible to have an occupancy % across 10,20, 30 SFRs that would be better than the average occupancy of a 10,20,30 unit MF building.

Also you need to make sure your SFRs are not very different from each other, meaning, similar roof ages, similar MEP ages. If you start having wildly different maintenance factors across your SFR portfolio you will probably end up chasing too many individual repair problems (large and small). In an SFR portfolio this unavoidable but you can do your best to try to get your SFRs to be as similar as possible and mitigate that risk.

This brings me back to strengths and weaknesses of the investor. We are strong on project management and systems even with a property manager that is also strong in those areas. There is just alot to track with SFRs and if you don't have the mindset and or systems to track all of it, SFR portfolios are probably are not the best fit as it will seem out of control and overwhelming.

For me I would I say I would not be able to speak with such confidence about SFRs if I didn't have experience with Multifamily.  

@Stephen Sawrie I would call an SDIRA specialist. Contact me directly and I will give you a name to call.  This is where I must bow out and let the super experts give you the details from the source

@Daniel Dietz

I would be careful here, I didn't see you mention anything about self-dealing.  

You can't use your own SDIRA funds to fund a deal that you have ownership. Someone else can use their SDIRA to invest with you but you can't use your own for yourself.  Not even your spouse's SDIRA for your own deal. You can use your SDIRA funds to invest in another deal that is not your own.

Check with an SDIRA specialist to confirm those exclusions.

Oh this thread was about looming downturn preventing from buying. 

No it is not preventing from buying but all your decisions need to have a view of what may come and how your investment would handle a downturn.  

Just need to be cautious and have your proformas have a view what could happen and how long you could ride out that storm.  

For instance I chose a 10 year fixed cash out refi recently with a slightly higher int rate with a 20 year AM on 2 apt buildings because I wanted the safety of two things 1) even with higher interest rate it is still relatively low without some forced refi event in 5 years from that would make me nervous. I have that rate for 10 years 2) 20 year AM has just such a higher principal paydown that even if doomeday day occurs in 10 years from now my equity will be there as a safety net that was paid down by the 20 year am. A refi or sale would be possible without a loss in a bad situation 

Now not all deals work with a 20 year AM, the payments are higher but mine did and took it. But one must just look at all scnarios and maximize your hedges where you can take them

@Jon Q. and @David Faulkner  You both bring up really great points and I believe you both to be correct.  

Investing local can be really limiting sometime depending where someone lives.  Also investing long distance does have its challenges that one must overcome to be successful.  But in this age of instant information availability and realtime video communication, I would say that if one is limited by their local market conditions to achieve their investment goals Jon S is correct.  Now more than ever an investor has tools available to them they can use to overcome some of those hurdles that come with 'long-distance' investing.  

Just vast amounts of data are available to you at an instant if you know where to look.  If you dont know where to look then you need to research to find where to look. 

Communication is there for you to communicate and most importantly verify what is being communicated to you by your long distance team.  There are also sharable project management tools where your team can update real time with you so you can have an ongoing conversation about status with pictures, video, budget etc. Almost as if you have department at a big company that you meet with weekly , bi weekly or monthly.

I do think David is correct though that if you are not willing to really utilize these tools correctly so that you have a successful business communication and verification system, the long distance investment can go off the rails in a hurry. 

I actually would love to invest locally but here it is high capital risk for really only flips. SFR rentals don't yield what they need to vs the capital outlay required.

I have seen a few investors invest long distance and think it just goes on autopilot and then when they realize its not all pleasantville they dont have the tools or quite honestly the desire the do what it takes to turn the long distance investment around. They become disenfranchised and lose further interest and thus the investment performs even more poorly.  Whereas locally it is possible that same investor would have A) seen the property start to decline earlier B) be closer and more willing to do that big effort to turn the property back around or not let it go down in the first place

When you long distance invest you do have to be willing to pay 1200 bucks to get on a plane the next morning even with all the technology tools available for instant communication and show your face to let everyone know you are serious.  Nothing says serious like having a crappy conversation on Tuesday night and showing up the next day at 11am with a 2 hour plane flight.  Things move :)

Anyway that was a really long-winded way to say you are both right.  ha