All Forum Posts by: Henry Li

@Zachary Bohn  

@Natalie Kolodij    

thank you for clearing up my thought .... too bad..  now i'm stuck with my mortgage that has 0 tax benefit. 

With the new tax law, our primary residence mortgage interest doesn't have tax advantage anymore to my understanding. I however own other investment properties , and there is one that is actually paid off. Would it make sense to get a loan from the paid off rental property to pay off my primary residence? 

This way, the rental property would have a mortgage, but the interest would be tax deductible because it is a rental. Does it make sense? or there is something that I'm not seeing it right?  

@Erik D.

My HomeUnion Fix and Flip Fund finally distributed the interest at the end of Nov. It was returned along with some of the principal. It wasn't clear when it was deposited but later they sent out a statement which has the details. I think it might end up fine but personally I just don't like it for a few reasons: 

when I talked to the rep, the rep gave me a strong signal that the return will be well over 8%. Now, with partial principal returned after 8 months, I have no idea how they will calculate interest for the remaining 4 -5 months. The interest paid wasn't at 6 month and there was very limited information given too. The web portal doesn't update anything neither even after the interest has been distributed. I felt like I was left in the dark.  

Looks like they will return some more principal soon, which to me I'm fine because I just wanna exit. But in real investment perspective, you don't want them to just do whatever they want and whenever they want. I think I'll be happy enough when I finally get all my principal back; even with less than 8% interest I'll be okay. I just won't repeat for sure. 

@Sandy Hu

wow, nobody replied on this one? scary is it? well, I actually have invested in EM starting just this year. So far I'm getting the monthly distribution. This platform seemed attractive because of its high yield. my investment is a 13% annual yield. 

So, did you end up investing in EM? 

@Mark Sokolowski

I looked into homeunion and have been keeping an eye on it for years already. I think it is a real deal even though I haven't purchased anything from them. They seemed to be very granular that you won't have to do pieces here and there like roofstock. HomeUnion fees seemed to be too high which would eat up most of your profit in my opinion. For this reason I haven't invested into HU yet.  

Their agents are aggressive. I did a try-out of their fix-and-flip fund just this year. I'm waiting on the dividend supposed to be distributed this month in Nov 2018. They are not very good at keeping investor informed in my opinion. I think I'll find out more soon after the dividend distribution.  

@Mark Moss 

Mark, did you end up purchasing on either homeunion or roofstock? I looked into both; roofstock seemed to have less fees but I think the listing price might be misleading; I almost went ahead but am glad that I stopped the transaction after finding out the price was at least 20% higher than market comps. 

i have invested in homeunion fix and flip fund. it has been half year, waiting on dividend distribution this month. hopefully no issue. I'm not too confident now because the rep kept on calling to ask for more investment but never mentioned about the interest distribution until I asked.   

Getting payment every month on time... plus i'm becoming a fan of what Dave does. Just bought his book too.  

The only thing is that it still doesn't have a working investor portal that I have been waiting for over a year.... you know these days for investors a web portal is becoming a very basic thing. but well, with or without it, I think I have very good faith about PPR by now.  

About 2 years ago I started keeping an eye on www.homeunion.com which is a one stop shop for buy and hold investors. It didn't make sense to me because I'm a local real estate investor - I could find local deal / flip / rent/ manage cheaper than homeuinon. Plus I had the question "what if it stays vacant? I will have no clue what to do. I will be mainly relying on homeunion to take care of my property"..... now in 2018, nothing in Boston surrounding areas makes a lot of sense anymore. I'm revisiting homeunion; well, still not too comfy buying properties thousands of miles away from me ..... looking for some insight, anyone? 

@Jeremy K. - So far so good, 2 and a half month in a row I got paid on time since I invested. I was considering putting a bit more $ to it.... but it just happened that I need cash for a house purchase. And after some thought, I still like to diversify my investments too. But yea, so far so good, customer service replied to my questions pretty quickly too. This is pretty important IMO.  

Only one thing though... I was told that I would be getting a customer login portal in Jan but I still don't have the login info yet. Tax doc is also not ready yet..... I was told that they were having technical difficulty. I hope they can get this straight as I generally don't like to wait till April to file my tax. 

To do this type of work, it is probably not easy nor cheap. Depends on the age of the house and the existing plumbing layout....  you will need a plumber to separate the water pipes before installing individual meters for each unit. I have never done it.... if it is easy I would consider doing it also for a 3 family rental. 

While your existing tenants might not like the idea, but Quincy rental is pretty strong. As long as rent is reasonable, I don't see doing this will have much negative side effect.