All Forum Posts by: Jean Bolger

Investing out of state with just one or two units can be tricky; it gets more practical as you scale up. You will have to go out and visit your properties even if you have good management and those costs can really take a chunk out of your cashflow when it's just a property or two.

Yes Denver is tough right now, but you might consider another condo (maybe turn your current one into a full rental and do another owner occupied loan to keep your out of pocket costs down) 

A house with an accessory unit that you could rent out might be practical. If you find the right area, short term rentals can be more lucrative than long term leases

The surest way to find this out is probably from the  PA real estate commission website. I'm surprised that info wasn't in your coursework, though. In Colorado the answer would be no, although they do allow you to apply for exceptions for minor convictions.

Depends on your price point. Those fiberglass surrounds are great for C and B rentals, but definitely don't appeal to higher end renters.

I have also had success with a reglaze

It's not easy to make money quickly in real estate. You're better off planning for the long term. That said, the sooner you start the sooner you'll get results.
It's true that you have almost no chance of getting a bank loan without a current source of income, so unless you have enough money sitting around to do some cash deals you'll need to come up a different approach. 
There's tons of information on BP about wholesaling and flipping, which are activities you might be able to start with. Both of those require a certain mindset and persistence but there are  examples within the BP community of people who have thrown themselves into one of those and achieved success pretty quickly

If your goal is a strong 'cash on cash' cash flow then Denver/Aurora may not be your best choice; we're more of an appreciation market right now. If you want to put in a large downpayment and get cash flow plus a safe harbor for funds then you'd do quite well. There are sections of Aurora that will be looking at strong appreciation over the next few years. Those would be the rougher areas, although I have to say none of it is very rough in comparison to a lot of cities.

I'm curious about the English property market. Have you invested over there at all, or have you been renting? I was just looking online at properties in Devon before I popped over to BP. Trying to figure out if my Irish citizenship/EU passport will still allow residence/purchase in England and Scotland post-Brexit-- do you have any notion about that?

Without knowing more about the properties you have, my general advice is this may be a bad time to do what you are proposing, frankly. The tight market in Denver has people overpaying for multifamily properties, and with rents as strong as they are then anything you bought a  while ago is probably going to cashflow better than anything you buy today. And they will all appreciate at roughly the same rate anyway. You could consider investing out of state, which is what I have done. It's definitely not for the faint of heart though. There are always multiple ways of approaching a problem, but sometime the best thing to do is nothing.  

yes, I am a broker and I'm telling you not to sell or to buy. WTF is wrong with me? .... is this  why I can't have nice things?...

;)

Obviously, the answer to all this should be in your written agreement with the lender. But if you didn't get all that sorted out beforehand and are just asking what standard practice is then I would say, concerning item #2: yes you would be paying interest on the full 100k. You are calling both calling it a loan, not a line of credit. You are, in effect, paying to reserve 100k of that lender's money for your use on your project. That means he can't allocate the money elsewhere to make a profit off of it. You're paying him to keep it available for you. Concerning #3) Doesn't matter if it's escrowed or not, unless you have something in writing to establish  those conditions.

I'm not a lawyer. But I know from the RE law I studied for my broker license that you can legally charge up to some ridiculous amount (48% or something?) in Colorado before it becomes usury.

probably not the answers you wanted, sorry. I hope you can get it worked out to everyone's satisfaction.

@Shane Baum I passed with no problem so I guess they prepared me well enough. I actually found it quite interesting. I also like that I have the books still so I can go look up something if I ever have to refresh myself on some obscure subject like dower estates or littoral rights :)

You want to be careful about taking on a small multi without reserves, and what you have now is basically zero reserves. Real life story: I helped my sister buy a four unit property this January. Remember that hail storm last week? She had actual holes in the flat roof from that, with massive water damage and two units currently uninhabitable. Yes the insurance will pay for the bulk of it but a typical hail deductible is $2500 and there are a lot of other costs that will be incurred. 

What would I suggest? Sell your car, buy something used, cheap and practical that will last you a few years. 

Buy a 2bd 2ba condo somewhere convenient to your new job and get a room mate. Look for something that will have some modest cash flow when you move out. Renting is going to be pretty much as expensive as buying right now, and this way you can be getting in the game and not tossing your money away on rent. I suggest a condo because rather than an SFR for a couple reasons. One is the reserve fund scenario. With a condo your costs are much more predictable- any major issue like a roof or a sewer line will be covered by your HOA payments. Another is that it's actually a lot easier to find a cashflow condo than a cashflow SFR in the area right now. And finally, a condo you can afford will be a lot nicer than any house you could afford on your current budget.

In a year or two you can move on to another property and keep the condo as a rental or sell it depending on the market and your long term plan.

You are totally on the right track. I wish I had been thinking like you when I was just out of college!

I think the best school for you depends on your learning style. I used Macintosh Real Estate School and liked it. I absorb written material far better than I do video/audio and they had the option of actual physical books (imagine that, lol!) to study combined with  online quizzes and tests.