All Forum Posts by: Vijaianand Thirunageswaram

@Cheyenne Gamangasso I am so excited to see many college grads wants to jump in to real estate while they are just their first job or finding one. It's good you all wanted to start early. I want my son who just went to high school to have license when he is ready for college and start working on deals. Anyway, it might seem easy to start with wholesaling, it's not that easy unless you are willing to do hard work. Wholesaling is called sweat equity for reason. You need to do door knocking and drive for dollars to find deals. It's so competitive in the current Houston market, so many wholesalers already competing each other..
I don't want to discourage but make your decision which strategy is better for you and have a plan and start working on it and learn from your experience and mistakes. That's the key. 

@Chris Hopper yeah, i know they charge too many points but they have come down a bit recently. I haven't used them for a while but I don't see anyone else SOLID like them. Do share if you have someone solid and better. 

@Mark Zermeno You got some pretty solid posts from Houston BP veterans like @Tony Castronovo & @Chris Hopper. 

I love what @Turner Wright said, " Real estate investing in Hard Work. Sure, you can always just buy one or two houses, but if you are someone who wants 'financial freedom' or enough passive income to live on, then you have to buckle down and work your butt off!""

That's 100% truth and practical advise. If you need really freedom, you gotta fight for it meaning work hard for it. Just sitting at home and reading and checking deals online doesn't cut it. I keep telling new investors, you need first define your goal.Without a target, you cannot aim for it. Just saying financial freedom is very vague thing and many people do that. You need to define it. What do you want in 1 year, 5 year and 10 year? What is financial freedom means to you. etc., 

What's your GPA - Goal, Plan and Action ? Define it..  and start working it..

Like school education, it doesn't help to you in the real world. It will get you to the door with good job. Same thing, good real estate education tells you things but you need to get out their and try it out.. 

@Ian Middleton As @Mark Sewell mentioned it's not bad for Non-QM rate. I assume you are going with portfolio lender. Did you try Visio lending. Let me know if you want me to refer to loan officer. Also commercial loan rates around 5.5-6% for 5 years with 20 year amort. They don't usually do 30 year fixed. You can try that with local bank like Allegiance or Frost for time period. That might help too. 

@Stella Mitchell Start with filling out your own profile first. Many investors when they are looking for something, they forget they need to atleast make an effort to share who are they and what's the current situation and what they want to achieve. By putting their profile together, it will help any experienced realtors/broker to look and see how they can help you. 

If you are looking for an experienced realtor/agent, you also need to show that you are willing to share your side of the story and start the relationship to work as team for the betterment of both to achieve together. 

We been lucky as well to have all our personal properties 100% except few delays hear and there. On the properties we manage, we should say 90% collection except couple who ended up having COVID and playing catch up and working with us on it. But still it's not too bad at all. One of my investors/landlord actually gave 50% off on 2 month rent for his 2 tenants which is really nice of him. At the same time, other landlord don't even want to cut anything.. We also tried to offer rental assistance through county and trying to help tenants possible. 

@Tanner Vandevere At this point, cash out refi is around 3.875 to 4.125% which is always 1% higher than regular home refi. Not just because of COVID, but that's always the case for investment properties. 

Taking cash out from your personal Home and investing to build your rental portfolio is the only way for many to get some quick cash to use for down payment. Even if you have to do HML, you need to pay for closing cost etc., I know many investors who don't want to touch their homestead house to be safe and don't lose it. I would say anything wrong with it but that's also not great strategy to dump all your money in one basket. Your personal home will never be an investment home so putting money to pay off quickly is not great strategy in my point of view. You should rather use the funds to build your asset and diversify whether it's rental or stocks etc.,

@Tanner Vandevere If it's cancelled that means, they either working out something to get their house back or the lender sold it out of auction. You gotta be prepared to do any auction whether it's online or personal county auctions. It's not a joke but it's doable if you are prepared. As @Jeff Wallace said there are many players and sometimes it's not worth the temptation. Also many auctions properties, they only promise the title not the property. You need to eviction the owners out and go through that ordeal in most cases. 

@Alden Cleveland Good question which many beginner really get confused. My forum friend @Tony Castronovo did clarify lots of things on his reply. Let me touch on it more as wel.

I use BRRRR strategy for my investment and for my investors a lot. But the BRRRR strategy which BiggerPockets teaches is more on the side of using HML whereas I suggest them to use their Cash. There are lot of reasons for that and obviously many cannot afford to put full Cash.

As per LTC and LTV, let me share with an real example. I just bought a property Jul15th through wholesaler in Sugar land for $193k using private lender instead of my cash. Because, I don't have to do cash out refi instead I can do straight refi. During this COVID situation cash Refi has been put on hold by many lenders. Also I have a good relationship with my private lender who lenders for me really cheap compared to other private lenders and HML. So I like the OPM :-)

He paid full cash for the purchase price, I didn't put anything. That property needed nothing at this time. Just turned around put that property in market for rent now. You can check it out, 9710 Fieldblook Lane, Sugar land. At the same time, I applied for refinance. Appraisal just came back yesterday for $235k which I expected. With 235k appraisal, 75% LTV would be $176,250 which would be max loan amount. I had to put remaining amount to pay my Private lender, plus interest for 2 months and closing cost which might total around $24k is my expectation. Instead compared to LTC if I bought the property right from the market for $235k, I would have to put $58k. I saved almost $34k down payment by using the built in equity int the house and reduced my out of pocket.

That's the true value of buying properties with built in equity using Cash or HML and use that equity to reduce your out of pocket and rare cases you don't have to put anything down and just closing cost. That's why people say, you can get full money back, yes it's possible but rare occasions.

Just to summarize, you don't have to stuck with the same BRRRR strategy, you can change it for your need and make it work if it make sense. If you have HM lender who you can use sure go ahead and their cost would need to added as part of the numbers to make sense.

Hope this helps. 

@Danielle Scott We had discussed in other post, many new investors worry about these things before even finding the deal or spending more time finding it. These logistics will fall in place automatically once you have a deal and contract in place. 

There are various factors involved in deciding whether you need to have LLC or not. First, you need to figure out whether you need financing, then LLC won't work because it will commercial loan. if you need to use conventional lending, you better buy from your name to make use of the low interest rates. You can change the title to LLC later and few lender will openly allow it like Trustmark bank. They do it for you. You don't have to worry about due clause which many lenders do even care. I have done it for my investors many times and nothing happened. As long you pay on time, they don't don't care.
Secondly are you going to take homestead or not. In that case, you lose that if you title to the LLC because it's considered investment. 

LLC is good if you have work in medical industry and exposure to liability in your field and want to protect your asset. Otherwise you can continue to hold in your name and take umbrella policy. I don't have LLC but have umbrella policy which covers all my properties.  Hope this helps you.

As per which agreement to use, again, get the deal first and worry about these things. Don't jump to step 10 when you are not even ready to cross Step 1. There are lots of agreement available online from BP. Do not worry about it now and just work on making the deal happen.