All Forum Posts by: Damon Aniton

You have a VA loan and want to buy a house in same neighborhood. You need a substantive reason why and paperwork to prove the reason. For example you need a larger house because you suddenly took on three adopted children and existing house is too small, then you show the adoption papers. You cannot use a owner occupied low down payment conventional or VA loan to purchase like kind house a few doors down if you just want to rent one house.

How long ago did you close the purchase of existing house with VA loan? This is part of how you can "make sense" on paper that you are not doing this for the intention of becoming a landlord. Could you carry both houses without using rents?

Since you say you work remote--- if you can get a letter saying that remote status continues 36 months then you could buy in another area with an owner occupied conventional loan. You would need some letter explaining why being close to Mom or your church or something makes sense... to make the move. 

@Damon Aniton yeah, you should get with a loan officer on these questions right away. For example, why aren't you using your VA loan again? There's benefits to just using your VA loan a 2nd time. VA loans have NO limits. You can get a VA loan up to $3million. After a certain point, you will have a downpayment....but still absolutely NO PMI on your loan. Again, a good VA loan officer can show you the math on these things. Feel free to post more if you need but hopefully this helps in some way. Semper Fidelis.

If you qualify for a VA loan (get your DD214 out) the product is superior to conventional in a couple ways:

no down payment, no ceiling on loan limit. 

Conventional loan limit ceilings change yearly and are by county. 

Hey Damon, 

Check the accuracy on this. This website says that for Louisiana VA loans, borrowers with "full VA loan entitlement" can borrow as much as the lender is willing to lend. If you're a veteran without full VA loan entitlement you can only borrow up to $726k. This is straight from the VA mortgage center.

If you're referring to the recently announced 5% down Fannie Mae program that is set to roll out on November 18th, this program was rolled out specifically for owner-occupied 2-4 unit properties. If you wanted to purchase the home behind you using this program, you would have to live in the property. For a property that is going to be strictly a rental you'd have to put 20-25% down. 

If you can live in this property for a year, you would be eligible for the low down payment. Then you can turn it into a full time rental after you move out. 

Hope this helps! 

Building costs in the New Orleans area are rather high these days. They are up about 25-30% across the board (labor and materials). To hire a GC to build a single family, it will run about $165-175/sqft. For multifamily, the costs will be even higher due to multiple high-ticket items... kitchens, baths, HVAC systems, water heaters, electrical panels, etc.

 yes, we have a housing shortage in our market of columbus oh. putting together the package now. looking at building the same building over and over and basically building one at a time and growing from there, keeping land cost low. I'm also a general contractor. what's your background? are you looking in NOLA or other markets? 

You have to be in a market where the cost approach is better than the sales approach. The reason building multifamily doesn’t work in many markets is due to replacement costs outweighing buying and renovating existing inventory. 

Side note - isn't all multifamily build to rent? As opposed to SFR which is called BTR instead of build to sell to an owner occ.