All Forum Posts by: Christian Hubbs

Sounds good to me. I'm a bit swamped at the moment, but things should clear up in about two weeks if you want to come up with a gameplan to build some tools.

My wife and I found a property in foreclosure yesterday that we love! It has two units, we plan to rent one and live in the other, and looking at the numbers, I think we can get cashflow out of it. It's in relatively good condition (the previous owner was recently sent to jail for running a Ponzi scheme) and in a good neighbourhood. The trouble is, they'll only accept cash, but we only have enough for 30% down, which would annihilate our budget for the cosmetic upgrades and purchasing appliances - which are missing. We wanted to finance via an FHA but given their cash requirements, I'm not sure how to approach the financing or structure a deal to take this further.

Any thoughts on how to get cash when you don't have it or another way to approach dealing with the bank for a foreclosure?

@Jeremy Taggart

I'm at CMU, so we'd like to be nearby, but Squirrel Hill and Oakland tend to be a little out of our price range. We're looking in Edgewood, Swissvale, and starting to see what's available on the South Side now.

@Dan H. nice to meet you! 

I'm new in Pittsburgh and RE, so eager to build a local network with like-minded individuals.

Has anybody played with the Quandl API? It promises a lot, but it looks like some of the documentation is out of date.

@Hubert H Byron III 

That sounds interesting! I'll check them out.

Right now, I'm looking for an API to consistently provide MLS data as a first step.

Hi everyone!

My name is Christian and my wife and I are looking at purchasing our first home in the Pittsburgh area. We just moved here from the UK and are renting at the moment while we look for a home. We're after a multi-family unit to purchase so we can rent the other apartments.

By day, I'm an AI researcher but looking to build some additional cash flow through rentals. I found Bigger Pockets by searching for real estate podcasts and started listening to the shows. I had never heard of "house hacking" before, but it was mentioned in the first episode I listened to, and knowing that was already the strategy in my head, I figured I need to learn all I can about this approach!

I've already learned a lot in the past few days since finding this site and looking forward to going deeper into this area!

Cheers,

Christian

Hi everyone,

I am wondering where you go for your data. I'm looking into multi-family units in Pittsburgh and I've been working with the Zillow API using the ZillowR package but keep running into a 501 error (Protected data is unavailable through API) with the `GetUpdatedPropertyDetails` function which returns critical info like price, number of bedrooms, number of units, etc. I would like to build a tool that will find properties that fit my criteria in a given region, then return some of the profitability metrics, sensitivity analysis, and so forth to help me quickly find suitable investment opportunities and return that into a nice report. If the data is available through the Zillow API, it's rather straightforward, but - in Pittsburgh at least - a lot of these properties have data protected. 

As long as API's are available, I'd like to avoid a scraping solution like this one, but maybe will have to go down that path and simply be careful about my requests. Also, I've looked into the Quandl API but have found the documentation to be terribly out of date making it very difficult to use in an automated fashion. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!