All Forum Posts by: David Diner

Jim,

(Complete opinion... no facts to bacK this up). I'm an engineer too (or rather a grad student in mechanical engineering) and it is far more comfortable for me to talk about that with strangers than real estate investing. For me... it's because real estate is just a hobby now and not a full fledged business that I am vested in. In the future (should I ever scale up and actually get a business model off the ground) I think I would have more motivation to talk about real estate. It's probably a matter of pride (good engineering accomplishments, not so good real estate accomplishments).

Long story short... Perhaps it is just a matter of thinking of your investing as your business / job as well.

~Diner

P.S. I'm looking for an engineering internship... if you happen to know of any...I would not mind a private message.

Brian,

First, it is (almost definitely) a better idea to round up some friends who would be willing to do this with you. For my undergraduate studies, a friend of mine did just this. It was a triplex, with three beds per room for about $200,000 (and it needed a good bit of work. He rounded up eight buddies who helped him purchase the place (I'm not sure of the details of the mortgage, I think it was in his name and they gave him their share of the monthly payments). They'd have social events renovating the place and over the course of a year, they had one of the nicest places to live near campus. When they graduated, their improvements forced significant appreciation and they were able to sell it to a local property management company and made a decent profit (I think it was about $5,000 per person) (sorry I don't know the exact numbers, I wasn't that close to him). In addition to having some extra money at the end of college, he learned how to take care of a house and although he is not pursuing real estate investment now, he is more prepared than most.

I am currently in a similar situation (graduate student with a minimal stipend). There's another issue (that I am currently trying to work around) and that is finding the time to manage the property. Best case scenario, you are renting to other students (who you screen to feel secure that they won't throw a wild party and destroy the property) and you don't have to do much... On the flipside, something catastrophic could go wrong the week of exams. At which point, you must fix the issues with the house and pass your exam (which... is where I'm not comfortable with house hacking while being a student). Also, there are plenty of tools and resources to analyze a deal in this community... make use of them. Also, if the place needs repairs, your weekends (and after class hours) will be spent on renovations / making the place look better. I'd do what my friend did... but I'm in Brooklyn and there is a significant lack of houses at that price point that are close to campus.

With all of that negative stuff out of the way... yes, it is a sound idea, as long as you are aware of the risks, and have the time to commit to being a landlord.

Jiawei,

I am in a similar situation. I just statted graduate school at NYU Poly and I'm struggling to find a more permanent place to live in Brooklyn. 

I'very spent most of my life in New Jersey (23 years) and my fiancée has spent a lot of her life in CT so I am pretty familiar with those areas. (And unfortunately those areas tend to be a little more expensive due to the proximity to NYC). If you turn to creative financing it should be possible to find a small multifamily property in the outer bouroughs or the tri-state area. If your just getting started... what do you want to accomplish with the first purchase...??? Do you want it to cash flow while you save income for the next purchase...??? Is this a primary residence (where you'll rent out the other units)...??? Do you plan to flip the property to make (I can sag limited things on that subject).

There's a lot of questions that need to be answered, but I'd argue that you should focus on creating a business plan (because Real Estate Investing IS a business). Make sure you have (or can leverage) a strong team (marketing, legal, accounting, etc...). If you don't have a team at your disposal... use BP (or other networking tools) to find like-minded individuals, lay down a plan for your first deal (and your goals for the next five years), and learn. Devour the webinar and podcasts and Knowledge that people with years of experience have shared on these forums.

Also... if you made it this far down the post, I would thoroughly enjoy a discussion with you and your friend over lunch this week...!!! I've been running a few ideas around my head but I haven't put anything to paper yet.

ThanKs, good luck, and I look forward to seeing you around these parts...!!!

~Diner

P.S. I wrote this on my smartphone while on a train. Please forgive any typos.

I'm sure this has been covered somewhere before but...

Is there a concept of pipelining when it comes to real estate investment...??? The idea behind pipelining is that even though there may be a long latency (the time between when you start a task and finish) there can be a high throughput (several tasks are running in parallel).

I guess my idea is that let's say it takes a property 10 years to start paying significant profits. Would it be possible to acquire one such property ever year, such that after 10 years, every subsequent year sees much more profit. Is something along these lines a viable strategy?

My intuition is telling me that it depends on how any cash generated is reinvested, but I'd like to know what more experienced members of the community think.

Not sure if this is the right place to post this...

Are there any 'quieter' neighborhoods in Brooklyn (mostly working class families). I'm new to the area and I'm trying to find a place to live (and ideally start investing!)

Thanks!

~Diner

io,

I'm just getting my feet wet, and am having trouble finding relevant data (median values for sale price, rent, repairs) and other secondary data (like rental vacancy rate, eviction rate, crime statistics, income, rent-to-own ratio, etc...). Mostly I want this data to try some deal analysis with 'ideal' data. If I have this data at a monthly resolution going back far enough (a couple of years should suffice), it would be fun to try to find out how these values interact with each other. (For those who are curious, I would be doing a transfer entropy analysis. If I get interesting results, I'll make sure to share them here!)

I found that CityData has a lot of the data I am looking for, so I've been using that for now. but I'm wondering if there are more specific services for more specific data sets.

I've found that I can get a gist for list price from zillow/trulia, and I've also found sites like RealtyTrac and FindTheHome, and I'm curious as to what a reliable source would be (I feel like I heard somewhere that sale prices are a matter of public record... in which case is would some municipality website / data store have the data available to play with?) Also, is there a data source that would have reliable data through a few years ago?

For rent, I was going through Cragislist and just taking an average, but this leaves me with the same problem of not having a time history of rent averages. This data is probably harder to come by, but if anyone happens to know where the information is kept, I would be much obliged.

Maintenance costs... I had limited luck with. I found an article (Estimating Annual Home Maintenance Costs) which was in agreement with the 50% rule. Is there a reliable source that might have more specific numbers? (I feel like the most reliable source would be to ask landlords in the area).

One interesting thing to note... there was a post here that suggested using census data, and Redfin for some of these data. This was definitely helpful! I'm just wondering if anymore resources popped up since then (the post was over four years old).

Thanks for reading / any good data that comes out of this / sincerest apologies if I posted this in the wrong place.

It seems I am a little late to the party, but if this is still a thing which will be happening in the future, I would like to stay in the know.

Thanks for the advice...!!!

io,

I'm just starting grad school (NYU). Finding an apartment (to rent) was hard, so I thought about buying a house in NJ (where I grew up) to commute to school. Then I started thinKing... this could be a good way to earn some money in grad school. So... now I'm looking to learn as much as I can about this business (to make life a little more interesring...!!!)