All Forum Posts by: Lance Johnson

Oh, HOAs. I understand the pain. I own a condo as one of my investments, and I'm not very happy with it. I actually bought it as my primary residence, and when I moved out, I kept it as an investment property, mainly because it had lost some value. I've had good luck getting tenants in, thankfully, but the HOA doesn't make life easy, generally speaking.

As @Jonna Weber said, it might well be worth seeing if you can sell and recover, and look for a less restrictive deal.

1) If you're just starting out, a spreadsheet should be just fine. If you find your list is growing very large, you might consider migrating to something like Salesforce.com or Zoho.

2) I strongly recommend you hire a company to this. In fact, you can even have companies generate the mailing list for you so you don't have to collect all of the leads on your own. While you could go an build your own mailing list, your time is probably better spent entering people into the system you build in #1, above, who have actually contacted you in response to a campaign.

3) Again, I would suggest a vendor here. You might want to listen to Podcast Episode #2, as Karen talks about her mailing strategy when she and her husband were just getting started.

For loans from family members, there are several options online. I've never used these, but I've heard of the following:

http://loankin.com/

https://www.nationalfamilymortgage.com/

@Eric Manuel - RealtyShares sounds interested. Where are you headquartered here in SF? It would be awesome to meet up for coffee sometime and chat.

@Paul Taing - nice to see some other newer investors in the Bay Area. I'm up in San Francisco, but the real estate market here is pretty ridiculous for new arrivals, unless they are coming in with significant wealth. I currently have one property in SF and another out-of-state. While OOS investing isn't the most ideal, it's really the only thing I've found as viable for the time being.