All Forum Posts by: Janel Wilsey

I purchased a house a couple months ago. It’s a 3 bedroom/1 bath brick colonial in Detroit. It’s in a C-class neighborhood very close to a large park and half a mike from a nice hospital.  

I paid $14,000 for it. 

I expect to put about $25,000 - $30,000 into fixing it up. It will look fantastic. 

ARV will be $55,000 - $60,000 and I'll rent it for $900/mo.

It’s not a huge home run, but I’ll get all or most of my money out of it and have some great cash flow.

To be fair, I got lucky finding this property. You aren’t going to find something like this in the BP marketplace. 

@Janel Wilsey this may be silly suggestion but have you tried email? Or possible submit a bid just to start the process. There is value listed in the details of the each parcel too.

I found the book Bidding to Buy: A Step by step guide to investing in real estate foreclosures by AJ Osborne to have a bunch of helpful tips, although I decided that buying at auction wasn't for me right now. I went to some of the STL City tax sales this summer and saw that there were some properties that seemed to go for reasonable prices and some went for much higher than I would have expected. I think one tip in that book was to run title prior to bidding on properties which I think would be a great idea, I'm not exactly sure what you tell the title company or that all title companies would do it. Hope that helps a bit!