All Forum Posts by: Elijah Miller

@Jordan Berry, I messaged you.  Thanks for reaching out!

@Aubrey Tatarowicz, thank you for the validation!  I felt like it was great, but I didn't know since this is really new to me.  

I just looked at it and this one looks great.  The hardware has been updated in the last 10 years (HVAC, hot water heater, roof) and it's got good bones and seemingly good tenants installed.  The seller's situation seems believable and isn't raising any red flags.  I'm excited.

The only downsides are a leak in the basement and the fact that the tenants are awesome.  A similar house in a lesser block of the city sold recently for 190k after some simple paint/refinishing of the floors. but I wouldn't want to kick the tenants out when my hope is to buy and hold obviously for the rental income.  

My thought is I could buy and refinance the hard money loan in a couple months using my instant equity by the income approach of the house (Valued at 140k by the 1% rule) to keep going.  Rental estimates for the area are actually showing it even a bit higher than that though. 

UPDATE: It will actually cash flow 675 until I install management and take out the HELOC. I'm pulling the trigger on this. Will update with how it went. Wish me luck guys.

Good morning everyone,

  I just sold my first house hack last week for a 29k profit, which is about a year's salary for me currently.  As I'm about to start medical school next fall, I've got a goal of developing passive income approximately equal to this salary so that I can eat and pay my mortgage on the condo (I plan to house hack again and live with another med student) preferably out of that rather than having to take out more loans that only have one repayment solution.  It would also behoove me to develop equity in some assets so that when I'm finished with residency I can sell them (Approximately 7 years from now) and be able to make a large lump-sum payment on my student loans.  

Just yesterday, I found out about a duplex for sale with a 9.4% cap rate.  They're asking 124k, which means I would be able to pay the 20% down payment.  It appears it would cash flow me at approximately 400/mo after PITI, and it's also possibly worth more along the lines of 150k.  There is supposedly no deferred maintenance and the tenants have also supposedly kept up with rent recently.  

My thought is that I could purchase this and open a HELOC after closing to recapture my capital and keep investing? This would result in the cash flow mentioned above. From here, I could use the HELOC to either purchase another similar property or a laundromat (Is my current thought, but I'm open to new ones).

While this sounds like a great plan, it feels crazy because that's a lot of money for me to put in one place.  Am I crazy?  What am I missing?  

Thanks for reading.  I look forward to your all's input.

Good morning, guys.

  In 2019, I purchased a house when I relocated for school.  It was a huge win as I'm about to sell it for a 35k profit.  For the next 8 months, I'm going to live with friends and family while I work, finish my last semester of undergrad, and try to make as much money/cash flow as I possibly can before starting medical school.  

My background: from an appraiser family, previously licensed and worked as an appraiser myself.  1 Flip.
My hang-up: financing

As mentioned previously, I've got to set about 6k back for an emergency fund, need to have some for furnishing my home in Knoxville when I move for school and some other purchases, so I'd like to use around 20k to make the most that I can. Some of this has been diverted to building a cryptomining farm (Previous PC builder as well, doing this myself with a 10 month ROI before it's considered cashflowing). With this in mind, I'm mainly looking at these two avenues (Real estate and crypto) as a means of diversification. and cashflow.

There's two deals that have stuck out to me significantly. 

One of them is a house near the house that I'm selling.  It's a wholesale with a contract price of 77k, rented for $995/mo atm, market value is 100k. I'm not really sure why they haven't put it on the open market at this point.  If I bought this property, I would likely continue to rent it out, but my question is then what? 

How would I finance the next deal from here? If I put a down payment of around 8k (10%) in then got a new appraisal, I'd have to leave 20% in it which would only allow me to pull my 10k back out. My DTI at this point would look like approximately 20% prior to the rental income consideration since I know the bank won't consider this for a bit on the next deal. However, I would approximately gain the income of approximately +$500/mo, which if I could find a lender or went hard money for the next deal would totally offset the, "Hit to my DTI" and actually decrease the DTI.

The next deal would be a solid straight flip. House is on assignable contract at 133k, ARV of approximately $225 in a up and coming area of town. Average on market time would be 82 days. If I could get this property at 133k, put 40k in *WHICH FINANCING THE REPAIRS WOULD BE SOMETHING I NEED TO FIGURE OUT* (Can this be done with hard money?), then I could sell it for a 50k upside.
  After capital gains taxes I'd be looking at approximately another $39k win.  This is literally a year's worth of tuition.. 

It's obvious to me how to get into one of these deals, but what I really need help on is figuring out how to transition.  It's also obvious to me after I flip, but if I could buy and hold for the rental income- that'd be great to have money to eat on while in school.

Thanks for the help guys.  This was great to be able to write my thoughts out, and also start working on my spreadsheet for these deals to analyze them in more detail.  Any ideas, thoughts, or guidance would be great.

I'm also going to be reaching out to a wholesaler that I know here soon locally to see if I can pick his brain. 

@Justin Frank, long term would likely be to continue the use of the property as it is and maintaining the cash flow from it.  We would want to increase rental rates, not immediately, but soon after taking control of the property to drive cash flow as much as we can. But I understand where everyone is coming from in saying that as a buy and hold type deal- it may not necessarily be the best for a first property. 

Short term: I'm trying to help my dad get enough supplemental income that he can quit his salaried job and focus full time on his farm land/hunting property business.  This would help him do that by replacing almost half of his monthly salary.

Long term: To be honest, I suppose that I haven't really thought passed the next couple years.  I'm set to begin medical school and hopefully an army contract next year, so I figure a little supplemental income and building what I can in that time may be nice, but not necessarily necessary.  My real investing for the income will come after completing residency.  

Any thoughts?  This is really about trying to figure out how to take a good first step.

EDIT: Follow up thought: would it be better to be looking harder for a flip for the first property? The reason I say this is the amount of instant equity we could get from rehabbing it, then do the whole BRRR thing. Ironically, I've got a guy that used to manage crews and do flips for a reliable reference several years ago living with me and he's itching to get back into it. We found one, and I've been trying to get a hold of them but it's not on the market and they're not returning my calls.

@Joseph Cacciapaglia- It'll be mostly passive.  Right now, he's been running in once a month to pick up checks and turn out keys essentially, which is why he is looking to get rid of it.  Electronic locks was one of the first thoughts I had, and other than utilities and insurance- there doesn't seem to be any other real costs associated with the business/property.  This guy has done no advertising.  The occupancy is reported to be at 90%, but we're going to obviously want to review his books prior to any agreements.  He could likely afford to up the rate on some units as well, and simply hasn't done so.  

Auto drafting is another plan that we had to ensure payment compliance. 

The thought with the office is either occupy with my dad's land sales company, or possibly another venture- then utilize the space essentially as a write off unless we're renting it out for income to another company. 

@Peter Korty, you have to understand that we are in Kentucky, and unfortunately, $1900/mo could very likely produce $900/mo net, and that'd be enough for me to live on with my rooms rented out extremely comfortably.  I'm not sure where you're from, but it's more than it sounds like around here.  Plus, we're just getting started and I'd rather have slow, reliable growth than big gains at the front end.  

After reviewing the forums, one of my favorite thoughts so far has been the use of a master lease/to-own with purchase option.  We'd give him, say 5k up front for the purchase option and agree to a monthly payment that's a couple hundred a month over and above his mortgage.  He still gets money in his pocket, he holds the note, and we get to build a little equity potentially, and we still have purchasing power should we find more traditional opportunities.   

Good evening, everyone.  

  Last year, I purchased a house for myself with 3 additional rooms to rent.  So far, this has been going very well.  I have two vacancies coming up soon that have me a little worried, but this certainly won't be a show stopper.  

Now, I've been on the look out for some good deals with everything that is going on; mainly for my dad or girlfriend to get some additional streams of income flowing.  This led to finding some potential foreclosure opportunities, maybe tax liens, but also a storage facility.

The storage facility has 34 units, and a 700 sqft office space.  It's currently bringing in about $1900/mo, and the owner is considering selling at $160k.  This seems like a pretty solid deal to me at first glance considering it's at 90% capacity, he's done no advertising, and the office space is currently sitting simply unused.  We have ideas on ways to capitalize on the space and encourage timely payment compliance from the renters, which he did note has been an issue.

A restaurant right near it has just changed hands for no less than $220k.

My question to you guys is two fold: What else would you be looking at/for? Would this be a good group-venture and first real estate asset with the sole intention of investment? 

And if so, how would you go about financing it?  I believe we should be able to scrape together about 32k, which is what I'm imagining the down payment requirement will be, but if there was a way to make it less so that we could diversify- that would be awesome too.

We all currently hold LLC's in our state of operation. One of them is turning hefty profits if this helps.

Thanks in advance!  I look forward to the creativity! 

@Tyler Bodi, thank you, sir!  Just finished that tenant interview.  As long as his background throws no flags, looks like he will be moving in this week! 

Good afternoon, everyone!

I am looking for some feedback regarding an idea that I pitched to our primary appraiser regarding a unique selling proposition for our company.  We are in a unique spot to some extent because he has been primarily reliant on another job to provide income and this has been mainly a side gig.  However, he is looking to make this a primary venture while also hiring other employees. 

The idea was the $1000 appraisal.  While this sounds ridiculous, or not very, "Dodd-frank", at first, hear me out.  The increase in fee is in order to have the appraisal in hand or back to your bank within two days.  In our area, many appraisal practices currently have wait times of up to 4 weeks.  He has been in business 30 years and would prefer to work lower volume, but higher return cases primarily, and the idea of cutting down the return time seems to be the best way to also increase our price.  

This turnaround time would also be guaranteed.

Is this a service that you could see coming in handy?  If so, why? And if not, why not?  

$1000 is an arbitrary number, the whole point was essentially charging at least double for guaranteed priority delivery times.

Good afternoon, everyone!
  Last week on Friday, I was seriously considering posting for advice about how I had messed up potentially and whether I should simply let this one play out until after I finish school or if there were other options to consider. 

However, I have had applications pouring in over the weekend from people that would be interested in renting a room for me.  Here's the story:

I bought a single family home in the Louisville area so that I could move/return to school in August of last year.  A friend moved in and I've been renting to him for about $500/mo, which has been great, but it wasn't as much as I was hoping and recently I have grown quite sick of the job I was working.  Despite having multiple listings for my other two rooms to rent out, I hadn't been catching many leads for them. 

Up until about a week ago, when I decided to go ahead and sink some money into advertising.  I included listings on FurnishedFinder and Roomster.  Roomster so far has been much more effective for this type of endeavor in my area.  I've generated 10+ leads so far and have interviews with 4 lined up at a price point of $400-$475/mo (Dependent on furnished vs. unfurnished), which will allow me to live here for free essentially with utilities included. 

My businesses on the side are also well under way.  One is generating $1000/mo but time intensive, and the other is set to generate $600/mo here soon with little involvement on my part.  

Just wanted to share.  Thank you all for being such a great resource! 

@Account Closed I will keep that in mind!  There is a good chance that I will consider fixing it myself if the conventional loan goes through.