All Forum Posts by: Jacob Barnhart

So I have a question. Why is the "renting" necessary for the refinance? I've seen it implied many times that the house must be rented for a certain period before a bank will consider refinancing, but I've never read an explanation.

How is it different from me refinancing my primary residence right now without income coming from it?

In my location of small town Oklahoma there is no access to live real estate courses, which would be my first choice.
Better yet, almost none of the well know online real estate schools provide courses for Oklahoma licensure.
That leaves me with very few options. Real Estate Express who has hundreds of reviews claiming it is a scam, or "Charles Barnes" which I can't seem to find any information or reviews on.
Is RE Express as bad as the reviews are claiming it is? Does anybody see any way around this issue or know of any other online courses that offer Oklahoma licensure courses?

I am not a real estate agent (yet) so I have no idea what methods there are to sell a listing. Obviously you can list the property on the MLS and your facebook page, but what else?

I live in a small town so open houses wouldn't do anything but waste my time since nobody would show up. Are you just expected to have a list of buyers to call on? How could I go the extra mile to make sure a home gets sold for a client?

To those of you saying you charge the first $100 (for example) of any maintenance to the tenant, does this include the maintenance on electrical, plumbing, structure, etc... that is deemed legally landlords responsibility to keep maintained? 
Otherwise, for everything else that is not legally landlords responsibility wouldn't you just charge the tenants 100% of the repair cost?

 Do you get any more rent for the house than if you were to rent it to a single family, or is it just a lot of extra hassle for no extra pay-off?

There's a home in my town with 6 bedrooms for sale ($100,000 asking price). I never see homes with more than 3 bedrooms up for rent here so I have no idea what the demand would be for this home. Very large families may be drawn to it I suppose, but that's a very small part of the population. I was thinking of either renting out each of the rooms for a low price like $250/mo (nice 3 bedrooms typically go for around $900) or going to talk to some fraternities/sororities on the college campus nearby to see if they would be interested. I would think the Greek organizations would jump all over the possibility of a frat/sorority house and even pay inflated prices for that kind of house.

What would you think? I'm unaware of any laws regarding how many unrelated persons can live in the same house in my state, so I would need to check into that as well.

When evaluating properties, I try to use the 10% of rent for maintenance, cap-ex, management, and vacancy. So 40% of rent set aside total to be on the safe side, but this obviously is very generic. Obviously a house built in 1980 in the good part of town will have different expenses then a 1940 house in the C- part of town.

What figures have you found generally work for you and for what kind of houses? Will you only put aside 5% for maintenance, cap-ex, and vacancy for a 1980's house in a good neighborhood. Do you base your it off of a specific cost or do you find percentages of rent or purchase price work best?

It's hard to determine if a deal is going to work well when I don't know how much insurance will cost me. I can't get an accurate quote from an insurance company because they need specific details on each house to provide a quote, which I can't provide when I'm just browsing through dozens of different deals trying to see if any of them work.

So I come to you. I've looked up Oklahoma insurance rates and I'm getting very conflicted statistics. Some sites say we are in the bottom 3 for insurance prices while others say we are in the top 3.

What do you pay for your landlord insurance and for what kind of coverage?

Yes, I am looking at offering on a property that the owner is asking far too much for. I have a personal reason for wanting this property that most people wouldn't, so it has more value to me than most other people. Specifically, it has a large shop that I can run my personal training studio out of instead of paying $1,500+ a month for commercial space. That said, the property still cash-flows without the studio (after renovations).

Since I obviously will not get full financing on a property being bought over appraised value, this is my question: Could I submit an offer to the seller for the lesser of: the asking price or the appraisal price? This way if the appraisal comes in lower than the asking price, I would just get it for appraised value? I've never heard of offers stated this way, but I'm thinking it could be a great option.

I believe there's a good chance the seller would go for it as well, because I've been talking with her for a while and I got her down 20% from asking price, but her children convinced her out of selling for that price. She wants me to have it. I just need a good way to get the property under contract that makes more sense to her sons who just don't understand how overpriced it is.

Bigger Pockets is obviously centered around the entire broad spectrum of real estate.  (As far as I have seen), the actual real estate agent side of things is somewhat scarce. What blogs or other resources do you use that have great information specifically for agents?