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All Forum Posts by: Heather Dickison

Heather Dickison has started 4 posts and replied 16 times.

Post: First Property Closed! Officially have six doors

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

Investment Info:

Large multi-family (5+ units) commercial investment investment.

Purchase price: $232,000
Cash invested: $43,000

Our first investment property is a six unit multi family property. We plan to fix it up, raise rents, decreases expenses, refi and buy more! It's that easy...right? ;)

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

After reading a lot of books and listing to many podcasts, I decided to go for 5+ units, vs single family or smaller. We want to be able to utilize caps rates to raise rents and lower expenses to get our capital back. Based on current NOI, expenses and estimated cap rate, the property based on our calculations should be worth $339,000 out of the gate. I think/hope we got as much of a steal that it looks like on paper.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

I found it on the MLS. We were able to negotiate $12,000 off of the purchase price.

How did you finance this deal?

We are using a commercial loan with a 25% down payment.

How did you add value to the deal?

Rents are currently about $200 below market rent per unit. We plan to fix up units (some are fairly dated), raise rents as tenants move out and then refinance once our seasoning period is over. Most of the tenants are on a month to month lease.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

We had a lot of documents in our contingencies and heard crickets from the seller initially in getting them. We opted to get a lawyer because we were fearful there was a reason for the crickets and didn't want to lose our earnest money.

After we received the rent rolls and leases, we found out they were $15,000 behind on rents. We almost got cold feet, but after sleeping on it realized the purpose is to add value and this could end up working in our favor. We will see how it goes!!!

Post: What are your goals for 2022?

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

I am just starting out (closing on my first property on Thursday-6 units!).

My goals are:

Hit over $1 mil in owned real estate

Have at least 20 doors

Quit my 9-5 in June-ish

Hoping all three of those are conservative and I end up with more/am able to quit sooner.

Post: Lessons Learned-Monster House Financing Fell Through

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

@Tanner Kenneth Jenkins

It was originally one house converted into a few units with a couple added into the back. But we're going to stick with more traditional multi family units going forward.

Post: Lessons Learned-Monster House Financing Fell Through

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

@Carrie K.

Our goal wasn't to focus on them so to speak. We found this one that was listed at $172,000 with rents around $600 each (with the ability to raise rents further once fixed up) and saw the cash flow possiblity. Our goal now is to look at non-monster house 5+ units that we can raise revenue/decrease expenses and take advantage of cap rate when we refinance.

Post: Lessons Learned-Monster House Financing Fell Through

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

We had a 5 unit "monster-house" in escrow that we were supposed to close on this coming Friday. Our lender okayed us getting another 5+ unit property and we were going through the motions of getting the mortgage. On Thursday (the day before New Years Eve), they told us they realized it was a house converted into units and said that while they will finance to us, they won't finance to us on that property. We tried calling other banks but being at the end of the year most people were out of office so we are taking that as a sign to not get it. Hopefully we can get our earnest money back but we will see.

Luckily, we are closing on a separate 6 unit on Thursday so we won't be starting back at square one.

I will take that as a lesson learned - do not buy monster houses!

Has anyone had success with a monster house? Or bad stories such as this?

Post: Unintentionally Fix and Flipped Our House-Getting Started!

Heather DickisonPosted
  • New to Real Estate
  • South Beloit, IL
  • Posts 16
  • Votes 14

Investment Info:

Single-family residence fix & flip investment.

Purchase price: $185,000
Cash invested: $30,000
Sale price: $285,000

We purchased a home that we thought would be our forever home. We completely renovated it; moved walls, added walls, doors, trim, floor, windows, basement remodel, all of it. We saved a lot of money by doing almost all of the work ourselves! With the crazy real estate boom, we knew we could downsize and move and get a lot of equity out of it to reinvest elsewhere.

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

We thought this was going to be our forever home and kept improving it over time. We knew the market being as it has been was way too good not to make some sort of money moves, making us sell.

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

We found it on the MLS. The seller was not at all willing to negotiate.

How did you finance this deal?

I believe I had an FHA loan and was actually able to get an IHDA loan to cover almost all of my down payment.

Lessons learned? Challenges?

In hindsight, we could have taken out a HELOC on the house (although we wouldn't have gotten as much money back out of it). On the flipside, if we knew we were going to sell, we definitely wouldn't have done as expensive of finishes as we did.