All Forum Posts by: David Ripplinger

@Elena C. I used to live in the area. I'm still pretty new to REI, but I think I can provide some useful input. I strongly recommend house hacking. Buy something with a mother in law apartment or buy a duplex, and then your mortgage payment will be significantly offset by the tenant's rent. And you're building equity. Waltham is decent, but I'm not familiar with the other places you mentioned. Have you considered Bedford? Genetti Street and that whole neighborhood used to be base housing once upon a time. It's mostly a bunch of duplexes, and it's really close to base.

@Michael Behrens Two passive approaches I have heard of are (1) be a private money lender to the active investors, and (2) be a passive partner in a syndication, like for an apartment complex.

@Amrakh Rustamov Yes. Ask others to verify your numbers before you close on a deal, and at least for your first one get a good inspection report and full scope of work from a reputable contractor before closing on the deal.

Alternatively, if you want to take a bit less risk to start out but still get a nice return, you can be a private money lender to someone else doing a flip.

@Dominic Blad Welcome! I'm starting my search for private lenders, so feel free to PM me as well if you want.

I'm fairly new, but I've been ramping up fast and just got my first out of state BRRRR under contract. There is some knowledge I can pass on, and I'd be open to finding ways we can work together. But if you'd rather with someone more experienced, that's totally understandable.

Regardless, buy the David Greene Ultimate Bundle in the Bigger Pockets online bookstore. It has the BRRRR book and Long Distance Investing book. That will seriously accelerate your learning.

If you are managing your own properties, and it's not a ton of properties, you'd probably get by okay building a free website, like with Google Sites. Google Sites is super easy even for non-technical people to build simple websites. For payment, you could give them a couple options, like using checkbook.io, paypal, or venmo. For maintenance requests, you can set up a Google form (which will notify you by email whenever it gets filled out,if you want), and simply embed that form on a page of your website.

Personally, I don't want to manage any properties, so I'm cool paying 8 to 10 percent of rent to a good property management company to handle it for me.

@Eric Veronica Agreed. And the people that get stuck at less than 10 mortgages should make sure they're counting their income correctly with the lease income. They can most likely get unstuck and they don't even realize it.

BRRRR deals should still cash flow at least some after the refi. This somewhat limits the pool of good deals to purchase in the first place, but I think there are enough out there that I won't settle for less. To be a good deal, I expect my all in cost to be less than 75% of the ARV because I really want to pull all my money back out so I can reuse it for more investments. I expect the cash flow to be at least $100 a door after mortgage and expenses, preferably higher. I'm not expecting properties to appreciate a lot. I consider appreciation icing on the cake. I do however want a property that will likely stay stable or increase gradually in market rent.

Most people that max out before reaching 10, it's because their debt to income ratio got too high.

Don't do a deal with him at all. Instead, get a cash out refinance, apply monthly rent toward your new monthly mortgage payment, and use that capital to go buy another property you can add value. Then cash out refinance on that 2nd property and keep repeating. This is exactly what the BRRRR method often talked about on Bigger Pockets is.