All Forum Posts by: Derek J.

I'd love to go, but work full time. Anyone interested in getting together on the westside one evening or weekend?

Under no circumstances should you use HomeUnion. As someone previously said, they ask you to give them a range, and you'll always buy at the top of that range.

They managed a property that they bought for me. It looked like a good, but not great, deal when I bought it. The rental comps numbers that they provided turned out to be much higher than was realistic, so the first tenant skipped out after about four months. HomeUnion didn't even realize that rent for the next month didn't get paid until I called them to ask about two months missing rent.

They then took three months to do repairs and find a new tenant. They claimed that the repairs should have been done when I bought--they just never told me about them. I certainly would not have bought at this price if I knew about them.

To be fair, they did cover two months rent, as related to this screw up--but $1700 did not help as much as you'd expect when the repair bill was $5k.

In addition, customer service is terrible. It often takes days or weeks to hear back.

Don't use them.

Wayne Woodson great thinking! the attorney HAS to tell them there's interest from a buyer.

Does anyone know how to tag someone who's not in the conversation? Trying to tag Sharon Vornholt, so see if she has thoughts.

Joshua Dorkin I think it's perfect that you listed the terms as text. I often don't have the time to peruse the forums, but I usually get enough content simply from my keywords. keep it up!

Will Murphey: have you found a lender that will do this loan?

Craig Sturgill, out of curiosity, why do you want to do a deal that doesn't give you positive cashflow? even if you live in it, you're subsidizing your tenants rent. Why not offer a price that will give you cash flow, and walk away if it doesn't work?

If you just want to calculate payment, look up how to create an amortization table in excel. you'll need to know the interest rate.

Yvonne, can you rent out the current place and make it cash flow? If so, why not just buy a new house, with a new mortgage, and rent out the current place?

Marc Bodinger, did you start out investing in other parts of the country? I'm not necessarily against it, I just figured I would learn more faster, and save money, by investing close to home.

I'm looking for my first property. I'd prefer a multi unit building, and I'm looking at listings on Craigslist to practice analyzing the numbers. Can you give me feedback to make sure I'm looking at this right, and if I'm missing anything? I'm in NYC, so RE is expensive. Here's the one I'm looking at:

Three story three family brick & frame Townhouse with finished basement. 3,520 square feet of living space. Each unit renting at $1,850.00 on a month to month basis and the garden level apartment renting for $1,950, with an additional $900 rental income for basement storage totally a gross monthly income of $6,550.00 Cosmetic work advised to increase rental value. Quite block, easy parking.

Lot Area:2504 sf
Lot Frontage: 25' Lot Depth: 100.17
Year Built: 1910 (estimated)
Number of Buildings:1
Number of Floors:3
Gross Floor Area:2,720 sf (estimated)
Residential Units: 3 Total # of Units:3
Land Use:Multi-Family Walk-up Buildings
Landmark Building: No
Historic District: No

it's listing for $975,000. Immediately I applied the 50% rule, and would likely only want to pay 600k for it. at a 4%, 30 year FHA mortgage (throwing numbers around), it would cash flow 410/month, or 4926/year. if I put 3.5% down, that's 21k, or a 23.5% cash on cash. This doesn't take into consideration the repairs, however, so I may need to offer more like 500k for this to be a deal? Thoughts? I must be missing something, right?

John, can you share some of the tips and tricks?