All Forum Posts by: Seth Holland

@James Wachob Thank you!  We are hoping to attend the Memphis BBQ-fest event you have planned.  We are also planning to sign up for MIG at the April meeting.

Hi @James Wachob - does the $100 include a ticket to the BBQ fest, or will we need to get those separately?

@Jason Hopkins Thank you!  Funny enough, someone else made an almost identical post yesterday, but asking for tunkey properties and he was given the same numbers.  I guess 8% is the magic number :-)

I was afraid of passing on a perfectly good deal when using 10%, but I agree - if I could use 10% across the board then I would know it was a home run giving me plenty of room to adjust later.  Changing from 10 to 8 isn't a huge change with the houses I'm currently analyzing, but it is still nice to see what standards others are getting.  Thanks again for the input!

Thanks @Elizabeth Wilson!

Hi @Elizabeth Wilson,  I wish we could make that coffee date, but we both work full time and 7:30 is right in the middle of our commute :-(

We are currently looking at SF mostly in the 38134 and 38135 areas. We didn't want to limit ourselves to a specific zip code, but a lot of the houses we're eyeing are in those areas. I'd like to keep the search area smaller, but until we get our first deal under our belts we've kept our search wider (maybe this is the wrong way?)

We are planning to manage the property ourselves, at least at first, but we're still accounting for 10% on the management side so when we do hand it over to a PM we'll already have the numbers in it. We are also including 10% for vacancy, maintenance, and capex. I think these are too high as these should be worst case scenario (everyone wants a home-run on their first deal right?), but they are killing our cash flow. I know we could come down on these numbers, but without more experience and insight I'm not sure by how much.

Hello BiggerPockets & Hello fellow Memphis Investors

My name is Seth Holland. My wife and I are about to start investing in real estate! We've been watching videos and webinars, reading books and articles, and listening to podcasts for about a year now and we are so excited to finally get started on our first deal.

So here's my first question to the experts: We've analyzed a lot of properties using the BP calculators. We're currently looking at houses in the suburbs of Memphis (Bartlett, Cordova, Germantown, Collierville). We're having trouble with using realistic numbers on our vacancy %, repair %, capex %, and management %. Can anyone shed some light on what ranges their getting for these? If I go too high on these the numbers don't work out on the houses, but I don't want to get into a bad deal if I'm being too optimistic. Any help is greatly appreciated!