All Forum Posts by: Mark Ferguson

Good for you to get a hold of one ! Anyone who has bought a lot of HUD homes in the past knows how valuable the info can be

I cannot tag him but Mark Ferguson, as a HUD broker do you have access to the HUD appraisal anymore ?

If you all don't like negative gearing you could not invest in Australia. Investors have based their whole strategies off negative gearing.

I like to gamble. GO A! Negative gearing ain't bad if you are for sure that it will appreciate. The fact you are from Austin I'm thinking your on decent pay and the property will go up. 

Every investment has risk and rewards. If you going to live in for a while as well then go A, bigger tax write offs!

Also if you keep trying to look a for a deal as everyone here says you're going to be on the side line for a while. Take the plunge but learn to swim. Least your in unlike a whole bunch of tyre kickers 

The house is not worth $120K.  Tax assessments are meaningless, and -- as in this case -- are not necessarily representative of the value of the house.

If the house is listed publicly and has dropped to $25K, then at most it is worth $25K.  What makes you think you could buy the place, relist it and sell it for more than $25K when the current owner is unable to do so?  If you can't then the value is whatever you purchased it for.

I would suggest asking the listing agent for a disclosure statement -- it's possible that there is something severely wrong that you are missing. Also, I would ask your agent to do a CMA -- it's possible that the house is just not worth nearly as much as you think it is.

Regardless, if other people (investors/homeowners) have looked at the house and haven't been willing to pay more than $25K, it's not worth more than $25K.

You can't really put a system that robust when you only have 1 PM and 15 projects, all you need is a good secretary that can follow instructions to the letter and trainable. No construction manager or project manager with a degree will understand the minds of an investor, we act quick and fast and usually have a 2 week timeline, whereas projects in millions will have more slack time to act on things, in a 2 week period, you have hours to solve the problem. If I was the OP, I would get 1 secretary per 3-5 projects, have a small 5-10 page operations manual, that will cover scoping, bid soliciting, contracts, and punchlist. pretty much after your 10th flip, you will get your price points already, so just measuring and scoping is the hard part to learn, everything should trickle down feom there. We are fortunate to have pictures sent over mobile, this helps a lot in decision making.

I've worked as PM (Project Manager) for 15 years with avg project sizes of $6M and my largest at $120M.  I usually had 4-5 projects across the country at a time...unless it was a large project going.

All PM's are not the same.  The difference is some are proactive and others are reactive in their approach.  It's the big difference.  Motivation pushes them one direction or the other.  Motivation comes from leadership.

What I learned, however, is that some companies invest into systems and environments that make their PMs succeed no matter what their personal abilities are.  Other companies solely depend on the PMs competence alone.  I disagree with the latter.  You can't put your business plan on the shoulders of a PM alone.  You have to build a system around that individual to succeed and turn a lot of projects.  If that person fails, the project fails...that shouldn't be the case.

To be honest, having worked in that field to the highest level, the failure of the PM speaks more to your systems than it does to their competence.

Mark Ferguson Short answer to that, he partnered up with one contractor on the side. :)

Mark Ferguson Haha, no, manufacturing is the very least you could compare it to. An office secretary of a construction company can do a better PM job than that. My previous secretary manages our "production" lines, aggregate production, motor shop, and supply chain, then she graduated to 3 projects (20-30 people per project) doing it only by phone and bi-weekly reports and one foreman meeting each week, but those are more easy, just doing roads and small structures like drains and ditches. It's all on the training of course. Houses has a lot of moving parts, and if subs are in place or your system is 80-100% subbed out, there is no reason for him not get jobs done.