All Forum Posts by: Jason Rivera

@Romont Johnson both through my real estate agent. I may back out of the 2nd one. They're asking for too much.

@Shauna Earl why next year vs this year?

@George Moehlenhoff we've had an offer and a good amount of interest. We haven't sold it just yet.

@Robert Guilfoyle 3 Bed / 1.5 bath. 828 sqft.  We reframed the whole 2nd floor to add closet space in the master bedroom, we made the middle room slightly smaller (it was long), and used some of that space to make the bathroom much larger.  laminate floors, drywall for the whole house.  The bathrooms were pretty much home depot items when they were on sale around holiday's.  Roof, electrical, plumbing, windows, hvac.  Fence and pavers in the backyard.  Custom railings inside and outside.  Appliances from HHGregg (again, on sale.  I think that was president's day).  I helped out on the fence and pavers in the yard.  My dad helped with the tile in the basement and some other tasks.

@Tom Doherty I'm currently focusing on Point Breeze.  

@Caleb Smith I did recently get a quickbooks trial.  I haven't gotten around to actually testing it out.  It looked like it needed a bit of configuration before getting started. I'll give it another shot this weekend.

My pleasure @Brenda B.. I forgot that I got the tiles from floor and decor and the laminate from lumber liquidators. I also made sure to buy the major items around holidays for the extra discounts. Right now, many stores have 40% memorial day sales.

Correct. Right off the MLS. It can be tough finding deals because a lot of investors scoop them up sight unseen and I'm not comfortable doing that even though I know what it'll take to gut and redo a property. This 1st property took a few months to find. We started looking for the 2nd one about a month ago. We may have found it but are double checking our math.

thanks @Jon Ree

hi @Patrick Philip. when I finally decided to take the plunge, I found out that a friend of my wife was a real estate agent so I reached out to him. It turned out that he decided to pursue a different career so he put me in touch with a colleague who has been great for us. I give her my criteria and she starts hunting. If I find anything that I'm interested in, I'll forward her the info and she arranges any visits to the property. She put me on to another property in the same neighborhood. Larger property. Comps going for ~310k and the property is going for around 150k. I'm evaluating to see if an 85k budget will do it. One thing that I'm going back and forth on is the target price. The 70% rule was great for the 1st house but it gets trickier with larger houses with higher ARV. I think I'm going to be more flexible on the rule. If the property doesn't fit the rule, I'll use MPP to aim for a target profit. Target profit also helps the agent. I imagine it's hard for her to remember that client A wants a 50k profit and client B wants to aim for a percentage. Oh, and my math factors in the closing costs on both ends. (4% on purchase and I use 8% closing costs on the sale).