All Forum Posts by: Dell Schlabach

We work mostly in the stark and summit county areas, probably 70% of our work, the rest is in Portage, Medina and Tuscarawas. 

Finding good deals is always a challenge...It was becoming almost a full time job for me a couple years ago, sent one of my guys to get his real estate license, and trained him how I analyze houses. Now he looks at and analyzed the most promising MLS deals, about 25 a week on average.

As you mentioned most of the new listings  if it's a deal, get multiple offers, we rarely get any of those.

So far this year we got 8 under contract on the buy side, running a little behind, spend too many weeks in Fla 😜Did snag up one in Perry a couple days ago, came on late afternoon, we offered full price, and had it locked up by the next morning. These are rare. 

We get more back on markets, estates, and by offering every couple weeks in ones that we are within about 20k of list. Get an occasional good HUD deal with major price reductions if they have been on the market for over 30 days. We write a LOT of offers, but it can be very time consuming.

Find a good competent  framing guy, will get a much better estimate in a lot less time then an engineer or an architect.

A belated welcome to Biggerpockets, haven't perused the forums for a while.

Nine single rehab and rent in three years that's pretty impressive. Congratulations! and wish you the best in your venture into the flipping business. Is a lot of fun and profitable if you can get all the ducks lined up. We do a lot of rehabs in the area if you need someone to run any ideas past.

Good luck with your endeavors.

We are six hours from Chicago, driving, or 40 minute flights are pretty cheap, Chicago to Cak. 

We typically have about six rehabs in the cycle, buy close to sell close.

If you want to come down sometime for a day, I can give you a tour of what we do, can run you through 3-4 houses we have under contract. Show you our one page deal analysis sheet we use to analyze our houses, can have you run a couple if you like to get a feel for it. We buy an average of one a week, our analysis takes about 15 minutes of walk through and number crunching to determine our MAO. We analyze a lot of house so we have to be pretty fast and accurate.

Not looking for a partner, we have plenty of reasonably priced money  available. Unless you are a good project manager and want to manage projects in Ohio :-)

I assume Chicago and Akron are similar for rehab costs. 

If you want to hang out with a partner who is being trained to run most of the rehabs, welcome to do that as well, but 5 hour drive make that potentially unfeasible. 

You always have an interesting perspective on things. Can you expound a bit on that idea.  

Is that taking the assumption that rehabbers don't have enough reasonably priced funding or is it that an equity partner can get them in better deals, better methods to scale up, better ?

Years ago funding was my problem to growth and scaling, today the problem is not funding, it's not finding deals, but scaling up the production. If I had a good project manager who could deliver 48 or 86 rehabbed house I could get them funded at 10% interest, I could find enough deals as well, getting a quality rehab done on budget and on schedule is a much bigger problem for me. 

Curious on your perspective. 

Depends on a lot of things, is this for a 40k  rental, a 125,000 flip, 500k flip, my personal house. Lot of considerations. 

I'd it had to be new I would do an line search find something satisfactory, search for lowest price print it out and go to hh Greg they will beat any price according to their rep. Did this once, these days we install in typical 150k rehab, Frigidaire, cheapest stainless smooth surface electric range and get 20℅ discounts at Lowe's, nor worth the trouble to negotiate with hh Greg everytime.

 We have bought quite a few properties from Hubzu "auctions" there isn't any way to put in a contingency before the auction that I know off. When you get their forms the next day after auction, no contingencies already checked. You can do inspection and walk if they fail, but don't expect a discount. We had an auction one fail septic recently ended up walking. Cost us a couple grand we had already paid, but house needed to be connected to sewer 10ft deep lateral, quote came back over 30k, we walked. 

Have another under contract, septic failed, five acre property required a 14k system, we asked for 14k discount,  they said no, we asked for mutual release, then they offered 5k, we said no we need full amount, they were going to send release, we proposed 10k and they accepted that. Was still a good deal at that price. But assume you are buying as is and be ready to walk and lose your earnest money if you back out of an auction property, if you get something better consider yourself lucky. 

 just ran across this, not sure if you are still looking for the infornation, but here are a couple names nay be helpful.

From what I understand If you do a 203k loan, you have to hire a licensed contractor to do all the work. The loan would cover the rehab amount, so you wouldn't need your 10k to rehab it, but you couldn't do a live in 203k rehab flip. 

You could contact @dale burnside he is in North Canton, an experienced 203k contractor no member.  

Residential Bancorp in Canton does a lot of 203k loans, you could call and ask them for their most experienced 203k loan officer they could advise you of the possibilities.  

 Kind of like what we've created in this market, think I'll stay here :-)

If I was direct mailing or finding properties off market, and my strategy was to get top dollar for the house, without doing any work to them. I would list  on the mls, seems like the place to get top dollar,  there are a LOT of rehabbers and landlords buying houses from the mls and paying more then we can. 

We have a couple niches and strategies that we exploit allowing us to get the deals we do, but new houses on the market in multiple offer situations we rarely will get any deal that way. 

Although we buy quite a few properties, we get about 10℅ of the ones we offer in. In other words a lot rehabbers and land Lords locally willing to pay more then I can for most all the houses. 

We have one guy locally that works short sales, when he gets a deal he always lists them on the mls...and almost always sells them for more then I can pay. 

 Apparently depends on where you are and your game plan...we wholesaled 31 last year to other rehabbers. All except two were from mls buys mostly reos, a few estates, also from mls, all done as simultaneous closes. 

 No marketing budget, no answering calls, no meeting with buyers, mls, and simultaneous closings on all of the wholesale deals.  We also rehab full time with a couple crews, all mls buys. 

May not be possible but it's what we do in Ohio, seems to me so much easier and cheaper then dirext mail marketing, handwling phone calls from sellers, and all the negotiation  with sellers.