All Forum Posts by: Connor Cushman

Hey Jordan! I invest in both states and am an agent in Georgia and would love to connect!

Hey Daniel! Use thumbtack and find people with lots of reviews. Takes a lot of the fear and uncertainty out of the situation!

Hey William! You might also check out St. Simon's island if you haven't already. Keep us posted on what you decide to do. Savannah market is definitely an interesting one

Hey Niyi! Welcome to Atlanta! Wonderful area with great real estate opportunities. If you make your way up to the suburbs north of ATL, let me know. Happy to connect

Hey Eric! If you're buying a new build, I've heard of scenarios where some of the furnishing can be baked into the loan, but it's a bit of a gray area that you need to act cautiously and work with the builder and your loan officer.

Hey Furrlo! It can be a challenge to find reliable GCs to get all that work done in a timely manner unless you have a strong referral from a friend or family member. If you have the time to space it out, it may be worth tackling one project at a time with different contractors. Thumbtack is a great place to find highly reviewed contractors

Hey Ryan! Congrats on getting started. A couple of thoughts:

Where are you? I'm in Georgia if that helps

- FHA is definitely not your only option. Build some relationships with good lenders and explore different lending options. Sounds like 203k loans could be a good option for you

- Condos and SFHs generally appreciate differently so I'd get more familiar with that

- Multifamily sounds great, but in practice can be very difficult to find decent ones in the southeast so often SFH ends up being the way to go

- Don't wait too long. If you've got 3-5% down and some reserves and you need a place to live anyway, I'd jump in soon so you can get the ball rolling. I wish I would've jumped in 4 years earlier

Hey Sean - I don't think you're going to find a good resource for automating this anytime soon. It'll always be wise to actually call the municipality to confirm your understanding of any STR regulations, fees, and taxes. Blue Ridge Georgia, for example, doesn't even have a website about this so you literally have to call to find out details. It's brutal. I don't think this will get fixed anytime soon because of how slow and outdated municipalities can be.

If you're going to make a few modest upgrades to a property to make it more desirable, ceiling fans is probably an item that would make it near the top of the list, but you're not going to necessarily derive a direct rent increase from ceiling fans. I'd recommend looking at your property more holistically in terms of its desirability and what type of tenants you want to attract and then make decisions based on that. 

Ramit Sethi always says asking $10k questions instead of $10 questions and I think this applies here :)

I grew up in North Georgia and I'm also an agent/investor in the Blue Ridge area so beware of my bias, but Blue Ridge, Georgia is a fantastic market worth considering