All Forum Posts by: Daniel Amsalem

You'll be joining a large group of investors that welcomes people of all levels!

@Elizabeth Zelaya for tax questions, you should probably ask a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). 

For structure and legal compliance, you'd want to ask a lawyer.

Most CPAs and lawyers will give you a free 15 minute consultation. Often times you can determine not only who you'd want to hire during these interviews but also get the answers to more basic questions.

Happy to refer you to who I used in a private message. That said, I've not used them for establishing an LLC.

There are also some good meetups that cover the basics on this topic such as Omni Casey's Cashflow Breakfast Club. It's free and I've learned a lot talking with him.

@Jason Nguyen I have a friend who is doing it on a small scale in the DMV. 

But he's connecting with landlords on a 1:1 basis and only those who bought earlier in Covid. Since they have fairly low interest rates, prices can be fairer for all parties and the cash can flow.

I helped him get his AirBnB unit running in his own house hack and then he began transitioning to the arbitrage model.

@Niecy Smith there are many great Realtors in NoVA, I recommend interviewing a handful to discover what their investment experience is and how they might be able to uniquely serve you.

In our case, we were looking for an investor who had flipped homes and could give us help with identifying areas that needed to be fixed up and ballpark estimates as far as costs. We also wanted someone who had a deep understanding of the neighborhood we were looking to buy in.

Our first agent had investor experience in that she owned a couple of homes. However, she did not understand AirBnB and STR regulations. That gave us some serious trouble when we acquired in an area that had heavy restrictions on this.

Unfortunately, you won't know everything before making a decision. But at least you can ask as many questions as possible, educating yourself during your search and then make the best decision based on the information you have.

Good luck!

@Arvind Prasad congratulations on your job and ambitions for a house!

My wife and I purchased a house hack in NOVA back in 2021. We've done well with it and are now looking to buy our second.

You can do this, I recommend going to meetups to connect with other investors both for realtor recommendations and also inspiration. I don't recommend going with the first realtor you hear about, interview a handful. There are some great tips on selecting one in David Greene's books, I think it was Long Distance Real Estate Investing.

We've got a meetup next week that you're welcome to attend. Plenty of new people attend and many experienced investors to provide knowledge. Details can be found here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521/topics/1106578-nova...

If you're not familiar with neighborhoods, I highly recommend driving around and exploring. We did that after moving here and decided on Alexandria because prices were fairer and it was still close to everything we cared about. Our friends chose Springfield because it was even cheaper and you got more home for your dollar.

Good luck!

@Khaled Seirafi we've got a monthly meetup that meets in Tysons Mall. Our next meetup is actually in a couples of days. Details here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/521/topics/1106578-nova...

At our meetup, a decent number of attendees are STR hosts.

In fact, I'm doing STR in my house hack, and I've helped a few friends get their STRs setup.

Happy to chat with you at the meeting or over a drink.

I also wanted to mention that the Cashflow Breakfast Club meetup is pretty great to get foundational knowledge. I've been to quite a few of Omni's meetups and he's always very generous with his knowledge.

I've been to one GRID meetup, the topic was STR, and the data was great. Unfortunately, I haven't made it to any GRID meetups since.

We hired Kelvin with Wendell & Anthony Media. He had 3 packages and his product looked better than others who were $100-150 cheaper and comparable to those who are $100-200 more.

https://www.wendellandanthony....

We used his pictures on our AirBnB and they look great! You can see them on our listing here: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/5...

If you want to shop around for better prices, I recommend looking for photographers on Instagram/TikTok who tag the DMV or NOVA or DC.

Kelvin's stuff was a bit higher end, with starting prices at $265 and up.

We used a gal by the name of Mona Wilcox to help us draft up a lease for our MTRs booked through AirBnB and VRBO.

Her website is, https://www.mwilcoxlaw.com/

She wasn't cheap, but we were satisfied with her services.

My only tip is, if you are hiring a lawyer for contracts, copy it over to Google Drive and make your edits there.

We went the costly, idiot route by handling changes over email. It took forever, and costed us a lot more 😅

Hey Loid, sorry for the late response. Hopefully this is what you were looking for!

MTR has been great for us in Alexandria City, in Fairfax County. We had about 2 weeks of vacancy in 2022 where we didn't have bookings. In addition, we forced 3-4 weeks of vacancy to handle some capex.

Getting tenants has been wonderful for us, in 2022 we only used AirBnB and this year in 2023, we're getting a couple of VRBO bookings in addition to AirBnB.

That said, I believe we get so many bookings through AirBnB because listing is pretty solid. I've spent a lot of time writing a great listing and we have professional photos. Plus, we presently have 20 reviews and have been Super Hosts since the beginning.

If anyone is considering AirBnB, you should definitely come into it knowing that it's a people business. We do our best to make sure each guest is enjoying their stay and will go out of our way to go above and beyond for each guest.

As a recent example, we spent the December 2022 through February 2023 in Florida and had an AirBnB guest check in while we were away. A couple of days after her check-in, we asked her how it was going and she mentioned that the dish drying rack we provided wasn't working out. We went through some Amazon options with her and bought the product she preferred. This and a few other personal touches ensured she had a great stay and we were awarded with a wonderful 5 star review.

For our current guest, we got into a conversation with him and learned that he was a young dude who was new to the DMV. Since he didn't really know anyone, I introduced him to a couple of neighbors and then we brought him with us to our monthly real estate meetup. He's a social bird so he had a great time discussing REI with others and it opened up his mind to local real estate opportunities.

Lastly, if you were wondering about numbers, we've since upped our rates from $2,100/mo to $2,400/mo. Part of our increase was from transparent discussions with @Alex Petsopoulos and his wife Genavieve who are also running an AirBnB just around the corner from us.

I highly recommend getting into MTR and if you want to talk more specifics, you're welcome to our monthly meetup where Alex and I with our wives are open books. In my opinion, the DMV is a land of plenty when it comes to MTR rentals

If you're thinking of coming, I highly recommend it. 

When my wife and I first began attending, we knew nothing and owned nothing. But we were ambitious and said hi to everyone. After consistently showing up, studying BP episodes, reading books and looking at the MLS something happened.

We gained some level of certainty in what we were looking for and ended up finding and buying our first house hack in one weekend! 

At the NoVA REI Meetup, we've met many great investors of all different stages of investing—including some really successful ones.

Come for 20 minutes, or stay for 2 hours, it's very informal and casual. Like @Joaquin Camarasa said, there's no product pitching or presentations. Just grab a snack from the food court, say hi and make new friends!