All Forum Posts by: Daniel Kramer

@Chris Gawlik I like SFR in good school districts, suburbs. We are currently in the middle of a project, so I am all tied up at the moment.

Dan

Good suggestion from @Ryan Evans on splitting it up by location. I suggest having a separate agent for each as well.

@Katie Sorensen

I'm not an expert on pricing, but I get notifications for Toledo. So my two cents is that it should be priced via pro forma and a fair cap rate as any commercial property would. When you put up an entire portfolio for sale, you're naturally cutting down your potential buyer pool to bigger investors. They're doing you a favor by not making you sell off each one individually, which would be daunting. They're compromising by taking a package deal and maybe buying a couple properties they wouldn't normally. So I don't think you can expect it to sell for full market value unless you determine it's worth it to do the legwork and sell off each one individually.

Dan

@Bob Prisco I understand and that's great. What we are talking about here is using a VA loan and a first time buyer. My advice is that getting a decent deal in a good market like Toledo, a 2-4 unit, using VA loan leverage... Is a great launch pad to 1) learn property management, 2) build equity, 3) gain contacts. He's not asking how to do 500 deals.

@Quinton Fernandes

It really depends on the neighborhood and number of bedrooms. A 3-bed side of a duplex in Perrysburg could be 1,300 or a 1 bed in North Toledo could be 350. I suggest first identifying where you want to live, do a Zillow search for duplex and your price range, see where there are concentrations of duplexes and if that can overlap with where you want to live. Start there, then start doing some calculations based on average rent in that area, for both when you're living in it and when you move out.

Dan

@Quinton Fernandes

When it involves the MLS, I always suggest an agent. No cost to you, it's a no brainier. You can and will likely search on your own in parallel but there is no reason to not have an agent for buying.

@Quinton Fernandes I always encourage young single friends to go 2-4 unit for the house hack. I wish i would have, it's a beautiful thing to have a multifamily investment property with an extremely low down payment. If you move, you have yourself a decent multi-unit rental property to hold onto that you can either manage yourself from a distance or let someone else manage. Over 4 units and you won't get to use your advantageous residential VA loan. Not to mention that's a huge leap. Single family obviously won't give you much opportunity to house hack, but its biggest advantage is exit strategy / liquidity. You can hold onto it as a SF rental, or you can sell it to the general population looking to buy a SF home. It can be hard to sell a 2-4 unit when you have a limited buyer pool (investors / smart people like you).

@Quinton Fernandes @Kristin Smith

That is a solid list. Like you mentioned with county foreclosures, you might have a hard time using your VA / conventional financing on any of these options but I don't want that to be discouraging. You might even ask your loan officer and they might say OK not knowing that they can't. The biggest hurdle is banks need to have the ability to go inside, with utilities on to have an appraisal. That's almost always impossible with some of those search options.

It appears that you have a pretty good idea of what you want. Just knowing duplex cuts down your list quite a bit. You also have to live in it yourself, so I imagine you might have some idea of what areas of town you'd want to live. I imagine you also have a price range, there's a third filter.

Where I'm going with this, is that the combination of narrowing your search and using a VA loan might really focus your search. It might be off the MLS and that is really OK because you get an advantage of leverage by using the VA loan. I'd still try to get a "deal" but that might only be a slight discount. Again, that's OK, because if you are starting your RE journey by house hacking with a VA loan in a solid market like Toledo, in a good neighborhood that you're willing to live in... That's a solid combination on its own right there.

@Aaron Romine Welcome! I am not a house-hacker but in Toledo and similarly new with just one rental completed/rented and renovating our 2nd.

@Kim Heretick Thanks for the update, Kim. Glad things are going well and it sounds like you have a good plan. Are you honing in on a target completion date?