All Forum Posts by: Daniel Amsalem

Come to our next meetup. There are a couple of wholesalers there who are very friendly and willing to chat plus dozens of others with a variety of experience.

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

Meg and I will be there!

We closed last August on a house hack in Alexandria (unfortunately outside of the beltway) but it was 550 with a walkout basement. I suggest using the local MLS app, HomeSnap. That's what I used.

I've not yet been able to do a long distance BRRRR, but we've got a guy in our NoVA monthly meet ups who has down a couple of BRRRRs in Virginia Beach. Send me a PM if you want the link to our Facebook group or WhatsApp group. His name is Peter.

Hey @Ricky Yao, congrats on the decision to proceed with your first house hack! My wife and I recently closed on our first and are going through the growing pains of figuring out how to maximize our rents with Mid Term Rental tenants.

I just wrote up a post on our purchase here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

Would be happy to share what we've figured out and would like to invite you to our monthly meetup in Tysons Mall on the first Thursday at 6:30pm. We even had one guy from Charlottesville at our last event!

Hey @Alex Petsopoulos, sounds like you're in a very similar position to my wife and I last year. We recently closed on a house-hack in Alexandria. I just wrote it up a few minutes ago here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

I'd be happy to share everything I know (not that much lol). We also have monthly meetups in Tyson's Mall on the first Thursday at 6:30pm.

Investment Info:

Townhouse buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $551,800
Cash invested: $35,000

3/2 townhouse in the DMV, NOVA region on a 0.13 acre lot. 2 bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, kitchen and laundry on main level, walkout basement with 3/4 bath, kitchenette, and washer dryer. Our townhouse is one-half of a duplex, the other half is a separate lot

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

My wife and I wanted to start simple and easy. We saved for 9 months, I was on the MLS daily, every weekend I'd drive to the top 5-7 houses. After 3 months, I found this house. I brought my wife there on Friday night (no agent), and loved the curb appeal. We saw they had an open house the following afternoon so we planned to stop by again. That night we found an agent, the following day we got preapproval/preinspection, that Monday we made an offer that was accepted that afternoon!

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

I found the deal on HomeSnap, the app for our local MLS. We didn't actually negotiate. However, to make our offer more appealing, we waived the inspection contingency, instead doing a pre-inspection and then proceeding based off of what he shared. We also had an escalation clause. We thought our max offer should be $550,000, but our agent suggested we escalate using odd numbers so we'd finish at odd numbers. Our max bid ended at $551,800 and we won against a competing offer by $1,800!

How did you finance this deal?

We put 5% down and went with a conventional loan to secure a better rate (2.85%)

How did you add value to the deal?

We furnished the basement and have been getting Mid Term Rental tenants (30 nights+). We actually bought below market and appraised at $575,000. Since then, several comps have sold at around $600,000.

What was the outcome?

We've been living here since the end of August and our living expenses went down from $2,500 (high-rise rent and utilities) to as low as $1,200. House-hacking has been exceptional!

Lessons learned? Challenges?

We thought we were going to get Short Term Rental tenants (<30 nights) but FairFax county has very strict restrictions. We've since changed our strategy to Mid Term Rental tenants (30+ nights) and are doing well.

Hey @Jin Lim I'm one of the admins of the group out in Tyson's. We meet up the first Thursday night of every month at 6:30pm. At first we were meeting at the BJs in Tyson's but we got a bit too big and now meet at the 3rd Floor Food Court in the Tyson's Mall.

I'm interested in attending more meetups, so I'll look out for your next post here. Everyone is welcome to attend our meetup. It's always informal, we just grab some food at the food court and chat. We average 25-40 people per meetup and go from 6:30pm until the last person leaves (usually 9ish).

See you there @Sean Sullivan

Hey guys, I'm looking for a channel manager with website builder as part of the package. 

I'm a web dev by profession but I'm not looking to do anything more than a few styling tweaks.

It seems that ownerreservations.com came highly recommended 2 years ago. I was also liking the look of sample sites from lodgify.com. The data from guesty.com (aka YourPorter) appears to be split. 

Do you have any recent feedback/experiences with such platforms? My wife and I have one STR