All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

This post is actually about my personal residence. 

Our house was built almost 18 months ago and we're starting to notice hairline cracks on our tile flooring. Our builder warranty expired about six months ago and we already have about 4-5 tiles with these cracks. Some are pretty recent. 

I'm curious if this is because of improper install, just settlement or cheap tile. We paid a pretty penny to get this tile installed and every time I find a new hairline crack I'm loosing hair from my head. Is this normal and I'm just stressing for nothing or should I start nagging the builder about this matter ?

@Cody L. I can answer only for Israel as I am an Israeli that immigrated to the US about three years ago.
The reason Israeli's are interested in investing in the US is because there aren't any good investment opportunities in Israel. The stock market is slow and manipulated by big investment/insurance firms. Government has over-regulated the real estate market to de-motivate real estate investors in order to slow down the price increases. This means that buying the 1st property over X USD is taxed, second property is taxed by 8% and up from the first dollar. Closing costs are expensive. The annual returns for real estate in Israel is below 5%. You need at least 30% down for a mortgage and it's very difficult to find a property that costs less than $300,000.

My property manager in Lakeland Florida recently posted a rental ad for one of my properties on ShowMojo. If you don't know ShowMojo it's a tool that you set up an ad on and it syndicates with all the major websites including Zillow, Trulia etc.. with your ad. It also allows scheduling of showings which makes the PM's life easier by using specifics forms to qualify a potential tenant.

The listing went up for a weekend where we gathered a bunch of scheduled showings and after the weekend Zillow dropped the ad on their site. Zillow is the major source of traffic to the ad so we stopped getting showing once the ad was dropped. After further research I got a clarification today from the PM that the reason it was dropped by Zillow was because they started a new pilot in a few states (which Florida is one of them) where they charge the PM's money for the listings and only let the owners list for free. I tried googling information about this but couldn't find anything, this is all coming from my PM.

Did anyone experience any issues with the ShowMojo and Zillow combination ? In the past, my PM did not have any issues with this. Just curious to get more insight about whats going on.

Where is that property you are looking to sell ?

I highly recommend Lakeland for rental properties.

If you're looking to sell one of these units I wouldn't mind picking up a multi family

I'm taking the dollar cost averaging approach to investing in RE. Market high ? I buy slowly, Market low ? I'll buy more.

On my personal finances I am frugal with my spending. I don't buy stuff I don't need and try to save as much as possible. Everybody around me buys a bunch of stuff they don't need and end up selling it in a garage sale the very next year. Golf carts ? No thank you sir, I can walk five minutes in my neighborhood and I'll be just fine.

Hi Eric,

What type of returns are you looking to obtain from a 125-175k property ? Are you looking for A/B class properties ?

 @Christian Paez, I'd love to know where are you picking up deals like that. I've been in the Lakeland market for over a year and I come across 60k+ houses only. My criteria is that it has to be block and not in a total gut condition. 

Yes please!

I have a SFR located in a busy area of Hillsborough Tampa which I think it's location can be grounds for appealing the tax assessment (it is really high). I was wondering if anyone can recommend a company that deals with appealing the tax assessment in the Tampa area ?

Thanks!