All Forum Posts by: Darwin Crawford

@Eliot M. - i've found an off-market deal through work that I am looking at purchasing. What kind of cap rates can you expect around Montgomery? this one is around 18% on a SFR, and is in GREAT shape. I'm across the country, and this would be my first out of state deal, so I'm trying to get as much info as possible.

Has good luck with property managers?  Place is for sale for around $30K and rents for $650. 

google this:  scam baiting forums

I just sold a duplex in Casa Grande, which I bought and had for about a year.  It's an OK market, but tenant base is terrible, and parts of town have lots of meth activity.  

The west side of Pinal is "glock territory", which is where my place was.  Didn't bother me, but made some cash on the sale, and didn't want the headaches.  

If you have nice 2br's, $500 is about par for the course.  I also interviewed about 5 property management companies down there, and was spectacularly unimpressed.  Lots of DGAF attitude and high turnover.  

@Joe Cantanzriti - many thanks for those referrals, and I'll run them down.  Overall, how is the market in Youngstown?  Are there a lot of those "lifetime renters" in that market, or is it more the upward bound crowd that rents for a bit then buys?  

Hi BP,

I've found a deal I'm vetting out for purchase, it's 3 Section 8 homes in Youngstown, fresh renovations, fresh leases, and the price is right.  

However, I'm in Scottsdale, and they're in Ohio, and I need to find the crucial part of making this work - a good manager.  

Been landlording for a couple years, but this would be my first out of state deal, and I'm pretty diligent about vetting this stuff out - some painful lessons have been learned over the years.  

Anyhow, I'd take any type of feedback I could from you about the Ohio markets, good/bad mgmt experiences, and/or section 8 experiences.  If I need to plan to go see these places, so be it.  

@Gino Barbaro - first, that's a LOT of doors!  Nicely done.  

Flooring, from a construction standpoint, is usually an inverse sliding scale of price vs durability.  In my multi-family and rentals, I prefer to spend a little more on the front end, and not have to deal with service calls on the back end.  They annoy me.  

That being said, polished concrete is great, but it is porous, and the protective coatings (clear) aren't awesome in the long run.  Providing you have concrete flooring, a properly installed epoxy floor is basically what's done in prisons, hospitals, etc.  It's very very tough stuff.  Material costs about $0.90/SF for the good stuff (not Home Depot garbage) and labor is, on larger jobs, roughly $1.25/SF where I live in Arizona.  

On a wooden subfloor, options are slightly more limited, but I prefer hard surfaces when possible, as well as things that are easy to service and change out.  

Sheet vinyl and laminate last for awhile, but have the great advantage of low labor costs to swap out. It's helpful to have the flooring priced in-line with the deposits of tenants...if you know what I mean.  Easier to deal with them when they are buying your floors and you aren't collecting in court.  

Nicer places - tile, thin (very!) grout lines, and well sealed.  

FWIW, before you go out and invest in a good sprayer (graco makes great machines), take some time and see what it costs to paint a house.  Unless you are painting all the time, sprayers will cost you way more than they are worth. 

Painting is typically a very competitive industry, and you might be surprised how cheaply you can get it done.  

I'm a little biased, but after spending time as a kid/teenager working the low rungs of the construction trade, I'll avoid painting pretty much at all costs.  

Sprayers are great, but are complex machines, and require maintenance, parts, paint, cleanup, etc.  As I've progressed in my RE life, I sub out more and DIY less, and painting was the first trade to go. 

No, they aren't sealed.  A typical service on AC units is cleaning the coils, throwing the High/Low gauges on it to check pressure/compressor performance, and putting a multimeter on the capacitor. 

Not rocket science, but package units are just more compact, and therefore more of a pain in the butt to service.  

To their credit, modern refrigerant systems use really high pressures, so if you do have a leak, they typically "bleed out" really fast, so some guys basically just check that it's working.  

However, in a tenant environment, with sketchy filter change intervals, cleaning the coils every year is a MUST.  

Ozone Generators!

Use them in EVERY room, multiple times.  Worked great on my last short sale property I bought.  

Amazon.com has them for cheap. 

Hey everyone,

Many, many thanks for the input.  I have not bought anything in the area yet, I'm finding these deals through my day job (work for national wholesaler as ACQ manager) but the numbers were pretty intriguing.  

I'm going to do some hunting around for a good PM in the area, as we have the bandwidth to feed them a LOT of business if this works out.  

These would be personal properties that I have the opportunity to buy from work, but I'm pretty cautious with these types of deals, we see a LOT of property come in from other investors who went "turn key" and got hosed pretty badly.  

I'll start working on those street boundaries with google maps and keep an eye out if anything pops up in the area.  

Been down the "war zone" path before, no thank you.