All Forum Posts by: Daniel Tanasa

Hello Jordan, 

Welcome to Bigger Pockets, 

I think House Hacking a small multifamily is the best way to get started in real estate.Since you are looking for areas outside of the city limits, I would recommend you to focus on the West and North West suburbs. There are not a lot of small multifamily in the suburbs, but sometimes we see them and they usually make good HouseHack options and the appreciation is good. 

Good luck with your search, and if you have any questions feel free to reach out and I will be happy to point you to the right direction. 

Hello Rashid, 

I am using TenantCloud for rental management. They use to have a free option but now is $17 a month for the cheapest option. I am pretty happy with them. Zillow and Apartments.com can make some decent free options for starting out.

For tenant screening I use TenantBackgroundsearch.com. 

As was already mentioned, make sure you call the previous landlords and employers, and do your gut check when something feels off. 

Good luck!

Hello Israel, 

We have a Landlord Focus Group and the BRRRR method is often discussed. This was the topic of last month's meeting actually. Also attending the monthly meeting for The Greater Houston REIA, you will find a lot of investors dong that strategy, and we often talk about it.

Send me a DM and I will be happy to send you details about the events. 

Good Luck!

Hello Victoria, 

Welcome to Bigger Pockets, and congrats on deciding to invest in your first property. 

Sounds like you have a solid financial and background situation to get started in this. Regarding the loan, I really like the 30 year fix loan type. If you want to pay it down earlier you have the option to do that by making more payments towards the principal, but you're not forced to do that if you don't want to. Also it will be much harder to cashflow if you do anything less than 30 years loan. 

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and I will be happy to point you in the right direction. 

Good luck!

Hello Victoria, 

Congrats on getting started and having the right questions in mind. 

1. I would suggest a 10 to 15k  in reserves for the first house. You can lower that amount per house as you scale your portfolio. 

2. Classes are a more subjective metric than you tend to believe when you read about it on the forum. What is a class B for someone can be a class C for someone else. But yes, they vary on a street by street and cluster level. Especially in Houston. 

3. I would ask the realtor you're working with to send you the flood map for the particular house you're looking at. There isn't any area ain houston where you don't have any flood zones, is on a street by street basis. You can also check the flood maps on FEMA website.

4. The slowest time is December to February, and the hottest market is in the Summer time generally.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and I will be happy to point you in the right direction. 

Good luck! Let us know after you get your first property!

Hey David,

The BRRRR method works in most parts of Houston if you find the deal cheap enough. I did it successfully in Katy, Cypress, Spring, Sugar Land, Kingwood, Sugar Land and Houston. I like the small single family homes around 1500sqft, 3 bed 2 baths with an ARV up to 300k. But that's just my strategy, there are many other ways to do it and many other parts of town where you can do it successfully.

If you plan to pull all your money out, most likely you won't find anything on MLS, and you need to focus on off market direct to seller marketing or buying it from wholesalers. I bought most of mine from wholesalers.

If you need any help with the process feel free to send me a DM and I will be happy to ppint you in the right direction. 

Good luck!

Yeah, I like it, you're buying it at 75% of ARV and according to your estimates it only needs around 5k in repairs.

You need to make sure you account for about 15% of the rent for vacancies, capex and repairs. If you're cashflowing after that, that's something I would go for it. 

Also you want to be in an area that you believe is going to grow and the house to have solid bones, to not have a lot of deferred maintenance. If it does have a lot of differed maintenance you may need to bump those reserves from 15% up to 20 or 25%.

Based on the information you have provided here, this seems like a deal. 

I hope this helps. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have any questions. 

Good luck!

Hey Leyha, 

What will be the ARV (after repair value)? How do you plan on financing it? Does it have floors now? Because if it doesn't, you can only buy it with cash or hard money. How much money do you need to put down?

After you provide these informations I will be able to give you my opinion whether or not I would buy it.

Hey Carlos, 

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Getting a bankruptcy attorney involved ASAP is the best course of action. 

Keep us updated on how this evolves. 

Good luck!

Hey Jorge,  

If you send me a PM I will be happy to share with you some lenders that can help with that. 

Good luck!