All Forum Posts by: Jason Turgeon

Mini splits are called "splits" for a reason. The condenser unit is split from the fan. That equipment is in a small "head unit" that is mounted in whatever room you are heating/cooling. Connecting the outside condenser to the inside head unit is a small diameter tube with heat transfer fluid (pretty much antifreeze, IIRC). 

This means you don't need ductwork, as long as you have a clear path for the little tube from the condenser to the head unit.

Different condensers can run more than one head unit. I think up to 5 heads per condenser is the max you will see for residential units. 

These things aren't cheap, but you can often get rebates from your local energy efficiency organization. Not sure if you are in this service territory, but this is the first hit I found on Google for Michigan based efficiency programs: https://www.consumersenergy.com/residential/save-money-and-energy/rebates/heating-and-cooling

This Old House had a pretty good segment on the tech, showing all the various permutations included "ducted ductless" systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb0UgFisz1E

Mini-splits all the way, especially if you are doing this to put the cost of the utilities on the tenants. Tenants aren't going to want to be on the hook for huge winter electric heat bills any than you are. If you put in mini-splits and can promote the efficiency, you'll be able to keep rents closer to what you get with you paying for heat, and you will also be able to offer air conditioning in the summer months.

You do have access to the MLS, at least a basic version of it. It's what powers zillow, trulia, realtor.com, and all the individual office websites you see. As a consumer, you don't get the same access a paying real estate agent does (but even then, we only get in depth access to our local MLS). When I am looking at properties out of my MLS area, I am on the same sites you are. I'm just using them differently.

I spent an hour on trulia last week looking at small multi families in greater Houston. I found 3 opportunities that were interesting to me, called an agent I found here on the forums, and she gave me feedback on all 3 and we started to plan for a more in depth search later this summer. Because I have made a habit of analyzing deals every day for a long time, she confirmed 2 of the 3 would be worth looking at. Not bad considering I know exactly zero about Houston. 

I have given you several points of specific, actionable advice, with concrete steps you can take to increase your knowledge of the residential market and improve your ability to quickly analyze deals. This was, after all, the subject of your original post. Whether you choose to take the advice I and others have given you is up to you. 

I will give you one last piece of advice and then leave the discussion. Decide what kind of deal you are looking for (house hack, brrrr, multi family where you live in one unit and rent the others, flip, etc.). Then look for deals that will work for that strategy. Then just go buy something. You might not make very much money. You might even lose a little. But you will learn more than you ever can by reading forums and asking random strangers on the internet for advice. 

You're not going to find deals just looking at Zillow, or any other website. You need to actually make appointments and visit properties and talk to people and do all the hard work of finding deals. So far you have made one call and visited one property. You need to start making calls and visiting properties a whole lot more often. Daily, if you can. Weekly, if you have a job and home life that makes daily action impossible. Anything less and you are just browsing.

There are literally thousands of posts about various ways people have used to uncover deals on these forums. Pick a method or three and try them out. I still browse the MLS every day, and I see real deals come up once in a while. Those are indeed gone in a day or two.

It's not easy to do all this. But it is not so impossibly hard that you can't do it. You just need to put in some real work. 

There doesn't seem to be a permalink to specific posts in threads. This makes it hard to go back and find something in a thread that stretches through multiple pages. Am I missing the permalink option somewhere? If not, is there any way to add it?

I use Hillery Dorner for many of my clients and my own transactions. She's exceptional. She's outside of Boston, but it doesn't matter because we do everything by phone and email - I've never met her in person!

https://www.dornerlaw.com/

@Michael Goldsmith if you are looking for a starting off point and you don't want to bother a realtor for comps when what you are really doing is teaching yourself deal analysis, don't use Zillow. As half a dozen experienced professionals have already explained to you in a variety of ways, it's not reliable.

Instead, use Trulia, which provides info on recently sold properties, and build your own comps. Yes, this is a lot harder. But it's also a lot more accurate, and it will teach you a lot more about how to quickly analyze a property than any amount of browsing Zillow will. If you don't know how to select good comps, teach yourself or find someone to teach you. Comps are the foundation of small residential real estate pricing. Pick one house on the market every day and generate comps for it. Do this every day for a year. If you want to compare your findings to Zillow, go right ahead, but do the exercise of searching out truly comparable sold homes so you can learn how the pros do it.

You should also be going to as many open houses as you can at this stage in your career, even if you have no intention of buying anything. Online photographs and street view are great tools, but there's no substitute for seeing places in person. Go to open houses and track which of those properties sell quickly and which sit on the market. Which ones get multiple offers and fetch a price over asking, and which ones sell at a discount? Do this enough times and you'll eventually learn to quickly get a gut feel for which properties are worth investigating and which ones you should skip.

My first property we bought out of foreclosure. It had something like 15 owners in the prior 50 years. Better believe we bought the title insurance.

My second property we bought from an old guy who had been there 48 years. He bought it from a family that had been there since the 1920s. In total, we are only the 5th owners in 175 years. We rolled the dice on that one and decided to skip the insurance.

These are two extremes. Most properties will fall somewhere in the middle. What you do decides on your risk tolerance. 

Discussions of risk tolerance aside, the title insurance industry is highly consolidated (4 big players control about 85% of the market) and insanely profitable (they pay out only about 8% of their revenue in claims). It's probably fair to say that title insurance is wildly overpriced, even if it provides a legitimate service.

@Steve Rozenberg, just filled out the contact info form on your website. Let's talk!

Well, you learned a lesson on this one. Next time you'll be better able to estimate costs. I don't think $13k for a full gut reno of a bathroom is out of line, but your selling price can't support it.

If the tile is otherwise intact, leave the handrail and soap dishes. Scrub the tile until it sparkles. Then do what others have suggested with reglazing the tub, paint, flooring, toilet, vanity, faucet, lighting, etc.

But since you are leaving the green tile and dated soap dishes, spend a few more dollars on the stuff you do upgrade. Don't buy the $95 toilet and $150 vanity and $1/sf laminate flooring. Get something that looks and feels like quality to help compensate for the lack of budget to renovate the bathroom properly. Maybe put in $5k instead of $3700. Otherwise you are going to end up with a bathroom that looks and feels cheap, and that won't help you get your asking price.

The midpoint would be to demo the tub and tile and put in a prefab fiberglass tub/shower enclosure. But that will still cost you, and once you open up those walls you will start finding other stuff that needs to be fixed.