All Forum Posts by: David Van Singel

Your strategy may depend on the goals you have. A possible strategy would be to aim to buy a house every 1-3 years depending on your savings rate. Buy a house now, maybe it isn't the nicest but needs some light repairs, maybe a new coat of paint, maybe power wash the siding. Just a little updating and it looks amazing. You're able to get a mortgage at a lower rate if you are the occupant rather than making it investment property straight away. This way, if house hacking isn't up your alley just yet, you don't need to. Once you decide to buy your next home, you could rent it out as a STR or LTR if you want.

As my wife and I are actively looking for something that we can buy and then when we move out, we could do STR. If you do work with a realtor, you will want to always check the area to see what they allow. Some places don't allow for very short term leases. I'm in the southern area of Orlando. Depending on where your work is and where you want to drive, Davenport or Haines City could be a solid place to check out. There are a lot of condos and townhomes in this area that are great for STR once you move to your next property/upgrade.

I'm going to echo some of what people have said here and give my own experience. On the bright side, you have more than enough cashflow to purchase a property. You have a lot of possible avenues you could go down so it's important to set your goals. 

WHAT? What kind of property are you looking into? Single-family? Duplex? Multi-family? 

WHEN? You mention wanting to be able to leave corporate life. What is your timetable? Do you want to leave your corporate lives in the next 5 years or the next 15 years? How fast would you like to scale?

HOW? How do you plan on financing the property? How much do you want to put down? Do you have a preferred class of neighborhood? Preferred town/city? I see that you want to LTR. Do you plan on self-managing or do you plan on hiring a PM? Do you know how many properties you would eventually want? Depending on your affordability, would you do one nice property or two not as nice properties that you may need to fix up? This may depend on your current time commitments. If you don't have the time, turn-key may be a great option for you.

I realize this is a lot of questions but this needs to be fit to your needs and wants. Speaking from the perspective of an agent, I would love to sell you tons of property but that might not be the right situation for you.
 

Welcome on in! The community is always happy to help if you have any questions! Do you have a direction you want to go? Single-Family vs Multi-Family? Short-term vs long-term?

Unfortunately, I feel like I am vastly lacking in my connections in these areas. I would love to connect to not only expand my knowledge but also help present and future clients if any questions may arise.

I would argue that there are deals out there just like Shawn said. Foreclosures are just starting to trickle again. I won't call it a flood of foreclosures anytime soon however, we've gone from 0-1 foreclosures a week back in Aug/Sept to 3-5 a week in Central Florida now. I've been hearing lenders also talk about more possibly in the next 12-18 months. Don't hang your hat on that though, if you find a deal that the numbers work, pull the trigger.  

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment.

Purchase price: $78,000
Cash invested: $20,000

I bought a cute 3 bed 1.5 bath home in the middle of the pandemic. It only needed light repairs to make it a solid rental. Previous owners were rather old and ended up taking care of the property as a whole. The biggest thing it needed was to take out the wallpaper and repaint.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

I wanted to have my own rental property for a few years. I had said to myself in 2020 that this was going to be the year. Well, it was quite the year.

How did you finance this deal?

Initially, I was going to finance the deal through a mortgage broker. The fees on a $60K loan came out to around 10%. After consulting with family about the rate structure, I was able to secure a private money agreement for better terms.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

If possible, the closer your deal is to home, the easier it is to find the time to work on it. If it is an hour away, it's harder to justify going out there for a quick 5 minute fix. If you're remote, have some good contacts in the area that can help if there is something wrong with the property.

Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

Ralph and Cassi Justiz at Spearhead Realty were very helpful in helping me find the deal.

I'm a realtor in the Orlando area. Do you know if they have a specific area they want to live?

To echo Bob, it is better to buy a property and wait rather than wait for something that MIGHT happen. With my current information, I feel like we're just returning to some sort of norm. We may have had people speed up their timetable for buying a home when rates were so low thus inflating current buyers at the expense of future buyers but this will be temporary. I won't be surprised to see a small dip in home prices however, home prices typically stay relatively flat in a recession. The only recent exception was the financial crisis and home prices dropped so much because they were the cause of the financial crisis. As a society and government, we have put in place safeguards to make sure that won't happen. 

I can't specifically, say "this is what the contract means" because I'm not an attorney. That's why your realtor is being evasive because they aren't allowed to interpret. They can get in big trouble for this. The best advice I'm allowed to give as a realtor is that you may want to print out the contract on the place you're selling and read through it. With 2 different color highlighters go through line by line and mark instances where they can get out of the sale and instances where you can get out of the sale from your own understanding. I wish I could be of more help. My experience with title attorneys is that they are pretty happy to answer questions. Your realtor could reach out and setup a call tomorrow with an attorney that should be able to clear up a lot of questions.

If you do need to go forward with the sale, what is the harm in renting temporarily? Is it ideal? No, however, this just gives you more time to find the right place for you.

I am wrong, @Khari F. is correct. It is 2 years. If you live in the home for 2 of the last 5 years, you can have an exemption on the property profits $250,000 if single filer and $500,000 if you're married filing jointly. The only caveat for the married one is that your spouse must also have lived in the property for at least 2 of the last 5 years.