All Forum Posts by: David Lee Hall, III

@William Orrock, your first sentence makes me want to ask a question:

"What makes you think they "seem great"?

Maybe the only thing I have learned over the past few years is that I know nothing. I will see a wholesaler list a SFH for $30k* that needs work and I think that looks great, could rent for $800 month and cash flow nicely with a BRRRR strategy - then I get to actually see it and put together rehab numbers, I run either BP calculators or similar Excel formulas, and find for it to meet financing rules for my lenders, I would need to pay $18k for it to make sense. Sometimes I am dumbfounded by the results - but there is a reason I do it, math doesn't lie. I still go into every appointment or offer hoping I didn't screw up the math or miss any major dollar repairs (roof, foundation, electrical, plumbing, HVAC).

*Now in this case I found on the tax roll he paid $5k for it, so offering such a low number wasn't an issue. In another case a wholesaler was asking $19k, I found he paid $18k, and the fact I found I would need to buy at $8k after doing the math - I didn't insult him by offering, just politely declined. 

Honestly, while not in CA, I don't sweat those assumptions much. I don't know anyone that can see 15-20 years in to the future accurately. The numbers try to give you an idea of when it perhaps a best time to sell/cash out on those buy & hold properties. As was discussed in, I think it was Gallinelli's CashFlow book, sometimes the ROI begins to drop after 5,7, or 10 years and the best bang for the buck is to sell sooner rather than later. If I wanted to get the most accurate data I could, I would probably buy a subscription to NeighborhoodScout. I have always liked their reports and details but I have never been able to justify the cost to myself.

Agree with @John Murphy. Check out Cozy if you need a quick way to collect and track payments from your tenant. Many of their features are free so you don't even need to add a line item for the cost! :-)

You could run into issues if using traditional financing. Usually banks do not want to see you use "borrowed" money for a down payment. I ran into this buying a property once. I had to wait 90 days until after that cash extraction so the funding source wasn't in the record period my bank was looking at (and hence, question and deny the loan originally). Look at hard money lenders if you can and want to be quicker. They lend against the property and are more concerned about it than your credit score than traditional banks. I have switched to private capital and probably would only use conventional if I was buying something for my use (new home, vacation residence, etc.)

I have a professional grade CRM, but use Evernote with tag for every property for more robust data. I can save to it directly from email, web sites, or any files on my laptop and include the tag of the property the information concerns. It doesn't track leads per say well (hence the CRM), but it does collect data and make it easy to access anywhere. Podio is good too - I have used it before, but not for real estate. You can build a lot of good workflows in it and share data with others. 

You can check with local property managers if you have any relationships and often they can give you ball park numbers for other variables you can't get hard numbers on. For utilities, if I know the provider I will often call and see if they will provide numbers for either the property (less likely) or the area in general. I wouldn't go into any situation with a tenant present without having a copy of the lease(s) and a signed estoppel cert for each tenant. You can make sure those requirements are in your contract if offering. Just as an example, you don't want to find out that they had some handshake agreement with the seller saying the only paid half of what was on their lease listed because they cut the grass and took out the trash. 

And that would make sense. I guess that is mainly just an adoption issue on my part since if I ran into that with Excel I knew I had messed up a formula somewhere! Thank you, @Jaysen Medhurst.

I am new to BP but have found the BP tools beneficial over my traditional Excel approach. One item I have continuously stubbled on though is the Cash-on-Cash ROI for BRRRR Calculator. Whenever I do a prospective deal the calculator comes back at infinity (Inf%) on the Refinance tab. I am trying to figure out if I am leaving out an important metric or if this is a bug in the online software (huge disappointment if so). Anyone have any thoughts/suggestions? If someone even has a deal they have run and did not get this result, if you could provide your inputs so that I can try and compare to what I have been testing with, it would be appreciated.

While I don't have a silver bullet for instant and updated details, these sites are helpful.

http://www.city-data.com

https://factfinder.census.gov/

https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/qui...

This one is dated at this point, but was good and I am sure can be referenced in a pinch.

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/economy-finance/...