All Forum Posts by: Hersh Shah

Austin, BP Rookie had a recent episode that had a guest that did what you are doing. He leveraged using his friends and their friends to do leases which generated enough cash to pay for school and several other expense.

That is a brilliant strategy for you as you can generate the income, learn the business and divert those earnings into your portfolio. I highly recommend giving that a listen.

Database. Database. Database. Start using a CRM and add everyone on it that you have every known and start connecting or reconnecting with folks (at least the ones you want to reconnect with).

Hey @Matt Olson welcome to the BP community. BP community is definitely a great place to connect and learn from others in addition to the thousands of blogs and articles.

Atlanta is a great market for flips and BRRRR investments to continue recycling your money. Buying a property that is extremely distressed has its advantages from a return on investment, however you won't be able to live in it if you plan to get a loan as some of those properties wont qualify.

If you want to do a live-in flip, try to find a property that is in decent shape in a great area that just needs to be brought up to 2021 standards. This would be properties that need mostly cosmetic work. There are plenty of properties on the market that are like that because typically end buyers aren't thinking from an investor's lens. Definitely not thinking about live in flips!

I would suggest becoming really familiar with a couple neighborhoods that you want to be in, especially if you will live there. Once you know where you want to be, do your homework on the properties in that neighborhood by finding out what sold, what it sold for, are others flipping, what did it resell for, what work did they do etc etc. 

This will help you analyze the properties in your neighborhood of choice and figure out if the numbers and the amount of work you would need to do to make it comparable is worth your time and effort. 

Happy to help more if you have additional questions.

@Jordan Harrill Waiting is certainly the hardest part, but in this case its the best thing you can do.

Id suggest continuing to analyze deals to improve your speed and accuracy. The better you get at that, the easier everything else will be.

Congratulations on the firsy deal!

@Duncan Stafford Congrats on the success of your first of many more deals to come in the future! That lead domino will lead to much bigger things as you take the lessons from that and apply elsewhere in your RE investments.

Brendan mentioned several good points to be aware of. Lots of submarkets in the country are experiencing the low inventory and high demand making it difficult to win properties. Atlanta is no exception, however it is doable with the right mindset and team especially since you will be doing this long distance.

For BRRRR specifically, if you seek out the worst properties you will certainly gain a competitive advantage because there will be fewer investors looking for those.

Happy to connect!

Sean, often times the FSBO wants to get out of paying the commission on the list side, but most are aware and willing to the buyer's agent fee of 2.5-3% market standard. If you are already in a buyer brokerage agreement with an agent, I would ask the agent to negotiate with the seller her commission since the agent will be comfortable doing that.

If the seller is completely against paying the agent, you can pay the agent's fee out of pocket to make sure you get the representation you need especially if the agent has already been working hard to get you what you want.

@Matthew Grisafe I have come very close to paying $0 on our first purchase. We bought a new construction townhome as a primary residence. By using the preferred lender, we were able to take advantage of $7,500 towards down payment and closing costs. My wife qualified for a state program for being a health care worker which gave her a 2nd mortgage loan of an additional $7,500 at 0% until 1st was paid off. Our only out of pocket costs were $1,000 which was the earnest money!

We lived there for a year and it now cashflows right around $6,000/yr as we moved on to property 2 with a similar strategy. 

@Alex Morrison thank you!

@Marco Valles

Congrats on making the decision to buy!

The first thing would be decide on a strategy that many others have said as that will help define your goals and ideal properties.

The second would be getting pre approved with a lender of your choice based on your financials or securing hard money/private lenders that you can work with once you select a property.

While you do step 2, start looking for properties either on the MLS or drive around different neighborhoods that you are interested in.

If you find an ideal property on the market, go see it and determine how much it will cost you to rehab and what the arv will be. If it makes sense, put in an offer based on your numbers.

If it doesn’t repeat step 3 until you find one and get an offer accepted.

If you identify properties not for sale through driving around, try door knocking, cold calling or direct mail to see if they want to sell.

If they do, write them an offer and close on it using one of the ways mentioned in step 1.

Lastly and simultaneously start building your team of contractors that will do the work needed in your rehab.

Book I recommend reading to understand the scope of rehabs is the book on estimating rehab costs by J Scott.

In summary you need to find a solid agent that understands your goals. He/she will introduce you to lenders that can get you approved. From there you can find properties on/off mls.

Secure contractors, start work, rent, refi and finally repeat.

@Avinash Shukla Just sent you a PM.

I am an agent here in Metro Atlanta and work with several newer investors. Would love to help you on your journey!