All Forum Posts by: Greg Carrier

Awesome Warren.  And the first one is the hardest.  It gets easier from here on out

You can form it anytime.  And Indiana is not a bad place to form it for two reasons.

1.  Indiana has pretty good rules

2.  If you form it in another state, you will have filing requirements their too, at least annual reports and BS.

That said I have two in Indiana and one in Nevada. The Nevada one was set up to further remove assets from my name. Not sure if that will work but people use Nevada and Wyoming for LLC's as they have stricter privacy rules in those states than in most.

Good luck

@Micah Cook  There are a couple of people from Granger out here Micah.  If it helps at all I can show you what I do with houses and how it works for us and then at least you can see the couple of ways we invest in real estate.  shoot me a message if you want and I can run you through what we do in this area.

I use Griner and company up in st joseph county if that is close to where your certs are.  And for low end houses we get that we expect to not touch and sell for cash, we just use quit claim deeds and do not quiet.  For flips where we redo the house we quiet titles.  I do not use title companies for the quiet title work they offer as they are over twice as expensive as an attorney.

Good Luck

I go to about five county sales each fall and a few each spring. (I also do some in Michigan). I find that with good properties. they normally go from 40 to 50% of my estimate of ARV. I do get some really cheap (less than 10 K for most but look at lots and wait for the ones with little interest in areas and in conditions I can live with. And auctions make for some strange bidding. I see houses in the fall sales that end up going higher than the fall min bid when they come up in the Srping. All in all though we buy every year. In the last round we bought 17 and have the St. Joe county auction going on now that we hope to pick up a few more. If you ever want to discuss, just let me know via a message. Keep going. This is for bargain hunters more than people looking for one particular house, at least that is the way we do it.

@Mark Wainscott.  Although most of the homes we have around here are smaller than this one.  My wife and I own several in South Bend and the surrounding area.  If you want an objective opinion on costs to repair, I would be happy to look at it.  I don't buy homes in that price range so no worries about me competing with you.  Also if you send me the address via message, I can make some estimates based on what we do to houses.  You may do different things than we do but it would give you something to compare to.

Greg

A 3 year payback for a turnkey is good.  I would do it.  That said I lived just outside and worked in Detroit and still do a lot of business down there.  Yes it is not all a "warzone" but if someone tells you too many houses are there and available  that keeps the prices down, isn't that a nice way of saying it is not a good place to invest (unless you really know your stuff and the area) which could be said is a bit of a more crass way by saying it is a warzone.  It is all semantics.  There are way better places to invest though.  And though I know the area pretty well, I stick closer to home.  You also want some kind of exit strategy even if you do not plan on doing it for a long time.  Lots of emptry houses and not very good future outlooks in the City would lead me away from there.  See if there is something in Ferndale or the south of Royal Oak or Warren.  They are better places and lots of others like them.  Good Luck

This does not fix your problem,  but on my first house over 10 years ago. I thought I would be about 55K and ended up neat 100K on the house.  It took a whole year and I ended up getting just about what I had into it back on sale.  I lost a whole year of my time so all in all a financial mess.  The upside though.  I had learned so much I knew I would never make all those mistakes again.  We have done dozens of houses since and currently own 20 with very good cash flow.  So look long term.  You can do this.  The road is just a little wilder than most people hope (and I had hoped) up front.

Good luck

I just bought3 SFH's which are all under by the same kind of shortfalls in rents. I bought them with good return at the current rents so my ROI is still good. That said though one is a 2/1 that the family is paying $350 a month for and have been in since 1992. I should be able to get $600 - $675 for it. The other two are also short but not by as much - about $200 and $100 respectively. My idea is to raise two of my three by a small amount (say 30 - 50 a month) and adjust the worse one to market or very close. If the tenant leaves from the big jump. Then I still have the other two paying and we can just deal with the one empty one. You could try that with your duplexes. Raise one to market and a smaller raise on the other and then you may just have to work on one at a time instead of both at once. Good Luck

We do very similar value properties. Our average all in at the end of 2015 was in the 38K range, but our average rent was $700 per month. We calculate ROI unleveraged for all of our properties to keep from calculating different properties differently based on house to house financing. At the 50% rule that gets us to and 11% return although in reality we do significantly better than that as we manage our own, and have lower vacancy, and repairs than we use in our models (5% vacancy and 5% repairs).

All that said I agree with @Account Closedthat $100 is not enough.  I know other people use that but here in Northern Indiana you can do better if you shop right and screen your tenants well.

One other thing, I started keeping rentals in the spring of 2014 and we are up to 16 now with three more to be ready in March.  My goal at the beginning was 100 houses which in my mind simply calculates at 100 X 700 monthly rent X 50% rule = 35,000 a month in pretax income  (again this is unleveraged) so for me to hit your 100K a month I would need 300 houses.  Run at that goal though.  Heck if I only get to 50 I will still be living large.  Right now though every penny and then some goes in to new units. 

Good Luck