All Forum Posts by: Diana Jing

@Juliana Molina

I'm happy to share our philosophy on building a portfolio and scaling it over time. We actually started down the path of flipping homes. We flipped about 8 properties before we decided to transition more into the TK space of buying OOS to be more passive. I agree that your numbers on the brrr model make sense in theory, but the reality that we found is that sourcing, rehabbing and trying to sell or refinance properties ourselves while still working a full time job was not the right fit for us.  All the rehab deals we had took significantly longer than expected, costed more in rehab, bank refinances did not necessarily go as planned, contractors burned us in various ways, property mngt was a nightmare, etc. So ultimately we determined that the brrr model was not as successful for us as it turned into another full time job (probably more hours than our regular job).  Ultimately it took longer than we expected, the numbers never panned out & it was WAY more stress than we anticipated. Not to say that it can't be done successfully, but I think for the newer investor or investor that is not wanting to take on a full time, high risk/high stress job with great variability in results, this is likely not the best place to start. Once we came to this conclusion on what the right path was for us, we decided to go the TK route to easily diversify into markets that we wanted to invest in outside of our local market. This allowed us to scale easier over time & have much less time/stress involved in building our portfolio. This was the right approach for us as we wanted to build a portfolio of rentals to supplement our retirement. We were not looking for a way to buy ourselves another immediate job like we did with flipping/brrrr. We are very happy still with how things are going, and very happy with Rent To Retirement. Their systems, professionalism, communication & ability to resolve issues that arise when they come up is above anyone else in the industry in my opinion. If you do some research on this site, you will see a tremendous amount of positive reviews about them & I've shared more details about my specific experience on this thread.

To your last point about how to scale with TK, it really comes down to being creative in what markets you are investing in and how you are going about it. Regardless if the property is a TK or regular rental you are buying from a seller, you scale by investing in the right locations that have strong cash flow and strong appreciation.  If you can create some value add with increasing rents or minor rehab, that may be a good niche. You can also bring in partners to have the ability to buy more rentals than you can on your own. Brrr and tk are not the only ways of investing either. We've done some STRs and creative financing deals as well at this point, but those also take a bit more time involved as well. I would like to point out that one of our new builds we did with RTR ended up with over $100K of immediate equity that we were able to cash out refi to pull all of our money out of the deal to reinvest. This was like a brrr, but with new construction that we did not have to do a lot of the work for. This helped us scale much quicker than if we did not invest in this project. The project did take much longer than expected, but the end results also turned out much better than we initially planned for. This strategy comes with some more risk & involvement, but can be a creative way in the TK space to scale quicker.

Ultimately I think it comes down to being honest about the level of time, risk, energy/stress & capital you want to invest & then determine which direction to invest in based on that criteria. TK is a great way to build your confidence with a few rentals in great markets, especially if you have limited experience or new to a market. Hope this all helps to answer your questions.

@Timothy Stripto generally I would say numbers are fairly accurate, but with all real estate there is some variance.  We have over 10 properties now (most through RTR).  The majority of them perform as expected.  A couple do better than expected as they've rented out higher than expected & have had nice rent increases year after year.  We did have one property where a tenant had lost their job where we had about a 2.5 month vacancy to get them out, repair and release, but that is performing well now.  I would say that is the only property that has underperformed projections.  Otherwise we are very happy, and plan to buy more.  Appreciation has been higher on almost all properties than we expected over just a couple of years allowing us to 1031 into more properties in a short period of time.  That was a nice surprise!

@Whitney Breedlove 

Happy to help!

@Tamara M.

Of course.  Feel free to reach out & I'd be happy to assist however I can.

@Whitney Breedlove Insurance on the homes is just under $700 annually which is very reasonable.  This includes normal wind/storm covering hurricanes.  There was no additional insurance required for that.  We did not purchase lots in flood zones so flood insurance was not a requirement.  Rent To Retirement had a few different insurance company recommendations to refer us to that we contacted to see who offered the best policy/premiums.  We could have actually gone cheaper on insurance, but thought this quote had the best coverage & was still very reasonable.  The homes are also built structurally differently to withstand strong winds, etc. even though I think that would be a fairly rare occurrence to encounter that over the next 5-10 years.  Hope this helps!

@Elsie Q. we completed our first build and actually had a tenant lined up before the house was even completed.  So we had zero downtime in renting it once completed.  The rent projected on it was $1,850, but they actually rented it out for $2,050 which was a big win for us!  The value on appraisal also came back much higher than expected.  So overall we are very happy.  The build took a bit longer than expected, but I think that is the case everywhere right now with material delays.  We actually went under contract to do two more builds with RTR after seeing how well this first one performed.  I wish we had more capital to do more!

@Andrew Maxion

Glad you found my post useful!  We are still actively investing with them, and still recommending them.  I will do my best to keep this post updated with how other investments are going.  We are doing our best to continually grow our portfolio as quickly as we can to reach our goals.

@Eva C.

Just as @Zach Lemaster mentioned, every time we receive an inspection report we provide a list of fixes we would like done to the RTR team, and they have been very good to be able to work with the local teams to accomplish the vast majority of everything we ask for assuming it's something that needs to be done.  I would say they are very easy to work with on this.  I know when we had an inspection on our primary residence the seller came back and said "too bad" they were not willing to do any repairs at all.  So I think working with a TK provider like RTR the inspection process is much easier, and they are more open to making repairs that show on the inspection with reason.

@Jennifer Hung

Sure, feel free to message me with any questions you have.  I'm not on this site all the time, so my apologies if I don't respond right away.  I'm glad you found my story inspiring.  I feel like we are still in the early stages of what we ultimately want to accomplish, but we are trying to stay consistent in buying more rentals each year to get us closer to our goals.  Working with RTR has definitely helped to give us some guidance, and made it significantly easier to acquire more RE than we likely would have on our own.  We were kind of all over the place in the beginning, but now I feel like we have a clear direction in our investing efforts!

@Victoria Knutson

Absolutely!  Feel free to DM me.  We've had a great experience so far with RTR, and highly recommend them.  Great communication, service, properties, etc.  They've helped us take advantage of a lot of strategies on how to expand our portfolio that we weren't even aware of as being an option.  We are currently purchasing two more properties with them now & will continue to work with them long term!