All Forum Posts by: Forrest Williams

Congrats on starting college Ethan. In my opinion, house hack is the way to go. You'll learn about budgeting for repairs, what you can fix yourself, and how to manage tenants. Calculate what the mortgage on each place you're interested would be, and use that to help you budget. 

A couple different ways to calculate rents. You can use rentometer.com, but that won't give you only student rentals. I would suggest asking upper classmen or other students how much their rent is. What are their apartments or rooms like? How far does a dollar go in your town? For your first deal, don't worry so much about maximizing income (although keep it in mind) and try to get a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house where your two other tenants split the mortgage and you live for free. That's a good baseline to shoot for. But if one bedroom rents for $500, and your mortgage is only $900, getting an extra $100 from renting out both rooms is pretty nice! Good luck.

BP has a lot of selection bias. People tend to post successes on social media rather than failures. Outside of certain threads dedicated to mistakes, people are less likely to share them. No one is posting about taking a 100k loss on a flip or condos that lose $200 /mo because of HOA fees, yet these things happen to people as well.

The great thing about scaling is once you've started, it gets a lot easier. Can you buy more homes if your investment budget is 10k /yr or 10k/mo? It's easy to be rich and scale up when you already have 100 units feeding you money.

Did she write 'prostitute' on her application? No? Then mind your own business. Seeing two different men enter someone's apartment on the same day is not cause for eviction. If she pays the rent on time and is a good tenant, why make a fuss? If it were a man with two different women entering his apartment, we wouldn't have this thread.

Also, this is a public forum. If you were to kick her out, she's got a ton of evidence it's a fair housing violation right here.

This doesn't have to be an either or. In fact, I think the best strategy is to flip a property into an investment. You save money on the purchase price, learn the tricks of the building, and hopefully rent it out for more. If you can refinance and get your money back out, you can do it all over again.

If you want to retire and live off your properties (also my dream) I would look at multi unit buildings you can have a property management company take care of. You could do a lot of the work yourself, but if you're retiring I'm guessing you want free time more. It may be worth it for you to cash in some of that equity on your rental homes with a HELOC or other equity loan, and get yourself something in the 10-20 unit range, depending on your area. Good luck, and welcome to BP!

I'm more than happy to discuss flipping with anyone!

Many investors aren't going to be interested in a D class property. You can change many things about a building, but you can't change its location. If you want to get started in investing, house hack. Best way to get some skin in the game, learn new skills, learn your market, etc.

Ask him if he has any cobra available, that stuff is the best. In all seriousness, this guy is definitely out to get your money. I would ignore him. Try to get to a meetup, or talk to some fellow investors on BP or a virutal meetup. Sounds like you're on the right track if you are already BRRRRing properties. Believe in yourself, Cory.

On a personal note, if you want to bounce ideas off someone, you can hit me up. I've got a 2 flat and closing on a SFH soon.

I would ask around your local realtors and see what they used. A national class may not be relevant enough to your area.

To tag onto this, remember that unemployment income is a source of income and protected.