All Forum Posts by: D.J. Parten

These guys do a great job: http://www.millbrooklaw.net/

Hey everyone, thank you for taking a few minutes to look over this post. I recently bought a tax certificate on a property, found out it is abandoned, and am working with a lawyer to take possession of it and get clear title. Assuming that works out, what are your thoughts on this project? 

The house is on a street where there are several boarded up homes so there could be a lot of potential in this area. The neighborhood behind this street is a gated community. Just down the road a ways is the country club and a small college. Unfortunately, this street has been neglected for years and some local investors aren't interested in buying here. 

The ARV is hard to pinpoint because there aren't many renovated properties on this street, and the surrounding neighborhoods aren't comparable. The sold properties range from $45,000-$68,000 over the last 12 months. Many of them are 400 square feet smaller than the subject property, though. While the subject is larger and will be in slightly better condition than all the other properties on the street, it has a boarded up house on the left and a vacant house on the right which hurts the ARV a bit. Because of this, I think the best bet is to rent the property as rents are decent even on this street. If things go well, I plan to try to purchase the houses surrounding this one and improve them as well.

What do you think? Would you invest here? 

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*This link comes directly from our calculators, based on information input by the member who posted.

Hello everyone, 

I'm looking for creative ways to deal with the following scenario. There are properties for sale by the state that are listed as vacant lots. The state got these properties from tax sales many years ago. These "vacant" lots have houses on them that have been all but destroyed by fire or storms or some other tragic incident. 

It seems like these properties present an opportunity to improve the community and drive up home prices in the area if we tear the bad property down and build a new home. I have no experience with new builds and am not prepared to take on the risk. It seems like my only options here would be:

I could buy the property and immediately list it for sale. 

I could buy it, demo the building, and list it for sale. 

I could buy it and sell it off market to a local builder. 

Do you have any ideas how to make some money on these properties? Any advice on how structure a deal like this? Any idea who would want to be the end buyer of a property like this? 

Hey everyone. I've found an off market property that I think would work great as an STR. It's a mid 1800s plantation home that has been very well maintained. It's not currently on any historic registries. It can likely be rented out immediately with no repairs, but obviously it will be a lot to maintain. It's 5 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and ~5,800 sq ft. The purchase price is $400,000, and based on my research the ADR per room is $100 and the occupancy rate is 66%. There is no HOA.

The major thing giving me pause is that there are not many STRs in my town, but the few that are here have caused a stir among some residents who are calling for new regulations to be adopted. In response, the city has temporarily stopped issuing business licenses to folks who want ti operate a STR pending future regulations. I have not been able to figure out what regulations they are considering or a timeline for any potential action.

Should I sit around and wait on the city to decide? Should I get involved with the regulation process and fight it? Any advice is appreciated. 

I'm a fairly new investor and live in Prattville. Would love to meet up! 

It did. Nobody showed up though, and I didn't try again. 

My dad and I decided that we would start investing together. He has the money, and I have the time and have been studying for several years now. We ended up getting two properties under contract that looked like great deals! The agents gave us decent comps that showed high ARVs and our initial estimate on the rehab was good. We were looking at around 70k profit for each deal. 

Once the properties were under contract, we sent out contractors to verify our rehab estimates. Boy, were we off. Some bids came back nearly $100k higher than we expected (maybe Dallas is just more expensive.) Then we called some other agents to verify the ARV our agents gave us. They were quite a bit lower than originally expected. Our agent told us that one property could sell for 600k. We got a "subject to" appraisal to confirm and the appraiser said we would get no more than 520k.

Unfortunately, we had to back out of both deals, but this was a great lesson. Your agent wants to sell the property to you and may find comps that look good in order to do so. Always confirm your numbers. 

Now the search continues. 

Looking forward to meeting everyone tonight. I'll be wearing a blue and pink button down and will let the host know that I'm expecting others. 

I see some people talking about facebook ads that send people to a website. I guess the biggest question is how should my website look?

Does anyone know of a blog post on how to build your email list? If not, can someone elaborate here?