All Forum Posts by: Greg Brown

I ended up finding a better tenant that did not need a cosigner to guarantee the rent. Thanks for the follow up!

I've been using Professional Contractors Group for some of the work on my properties, they have been doing a pretty good job for me.

Most likely you will take over the existing lease, so you'll want to see it before you close on the property. They should convey the security deposit and rent over to you at closing.

I have been using Philip Forbes over in Newport News, his office has been very helpful for me.

I have been managing my own Portsmouth properties as well.

Not thus far. I have gone to City Hall a few times to meet with the people in the Planning office and make sure what I'm doing meets the City's historic district guidelines.

One of my properties has a secure entryway, so I hung a lock box on the wall for rent payments. I drop by after the first and pick up the checks. My other property I'm still getting the rent hand to hand from the tenant. I can see the need to change if I had more properties, though.

@Rudeka J. I have a lot of questions about how the City sets the value of the house, both before and after improvements. According to City of Portsmouth website it is a Fair Market Value based assessment, but their idea of FMV and mine are pretty far apart from each other. I was supposed to have a hearing this Wednesday, but they rescheduled it until next week. Hopefully I'll have some more answers after the hearing with the property tax board.

@Brandon Shaw I have done some reading on the VA and Federal tax credits. It looks like there are a lot of hoops to jump through, but I might actually qualify for one or both of those. The applications require high quality photos, and a lot of them, so I'm going to take the good camera to the property on Monday and start that process. It's worth a shot, right?

Good luck finding anything without an HOA down there, I think everything I looked at was in one. You should probably start looking at a lot of different deals and try to narrow down what you actually want, can afford, and can make a decent return with. When I was looking for my first deal I looked at houses and small multi-families in several different areas, and that helped me narrow down my criteria quite a bit. Is Coconut Grove still way expensive? It was when I was looking for a place to live, but that was during the housing bubble.

What area of Miami are you looking in? I haven't lived there recently, but rental demand was always pretty strong while I was down there. I had no problem keeping my condo in Plantation rented when I became an accidental landlord in 2008.