All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

@Andrew Postell I appreciate the info - thanks much!

@Andrew Postell I appreciate your response and your blog post - great stuff! I knew that different lenders had different rules (particularly around seasoning), but I really like your explanation on overlays. Makes perfect sense now with your explanation of overlays why lenders can be vastly different, thanks much for sharing that!

One follow up question - any idea where the 2 week time-frame comes from and is that 2 weeks by way of counting calendar days or 10 business days?

When getting pre-approved, are there any considerations when shopping approval & interest rates from different lenders? And are there any strategies to get pre-approved from multiple lenders without dinging credit score too hard from several hard inquiries? I've heard of folks getting pre-approval letters from multiple lenders without it dinging their credit multiple times, so I'm wondering if that is universally true or if that is specific to specific lenders.

Ignore my comment, I overlooked you were asking specifically about retail property.

@Ben Brown I'm certainly not a broker but hopefully I can provide some value towards answering your question. BiggerPockets has a "Rent Estimator" tool under the "Tools" tab at the top of the page. Also, I've heard great things about Rent-O-Meter as well. Since you're a pro member the "Rent Estimator" tool is available for you to use. Hope that helps some!

@Chandler Chittom Congratulations on getting ready to make your first offer on a BRRRR deal! I haven't done this myself, but from what I've read on BiggerPockets I would recommend getting pre-approved with both a hard-money lender (for the initial purchase and rehab costs) AND a conventional lender (for the refinance). It's critical to ensure the conventional lender doesn't have any seasoning requirements as that could potentially ruin the deal. My recommendation would be to find a good hard-money lender in your area that has knowledge of what's been coined as the BRRRR strategy, and ask them if they have a preferred conventional lender they like to work with, then get pre-approved with both. I'd also recommend reading David Greene's book on BRRRR investing as it goes over in much more detail the different lending options and considerations for BRRRR.

I appreciate the feedback James, I'll look into Batchskip as well. Thanks much!

I've been driving for dollars and cold calling looking for beat up properties that would lend themselves nicely to a BRRRR, house hacking, or flipping strategy, and I have been using some driving for dollars apps that help automate the skip tracing/reverse lookup process. In my current areas in Colorado, Denver, Englewood, and Centennial I've experienced that approximately 90% of the skip trace data returned from the driving for dollars apps that I've been using have been inaccurate.

When manually searching the addresses using the respectful local county tax assessor's websites, I've found accurate ownership information and have been able to hold actual conversations with the property owners via cold calling. I'm thankful I've taken the cold calling approach as direct mail would have sent a lot of mail to invalid/irrelevant addresses.

What have other people's experience been with the veracity of data that these apps return? Has anyone else noticed the same level of differences in data accuracy, or are there any recommendations on the most accurate driving for dollars apps that automate the manual skip tracing process?

Hello BiggerPockets community,

I have been driving for dollars in my area using the Driving for Dollars app and have some questions around the owner list data that the app provides.

The app has been great so far and I've run into a situation where I am faced with property owner information deltas between two sets of data (one set from the Driving for Dollars app and the other set directly from the local county records). The skip tracing and owner information that is being reported from the Driving for Dollars app is significantly different than what I've obtained from searching the county records using the addresses. While having two sets of different owner data for the same home can still be enumerated by calling/direct mailing to each of the addresses, I'm striving to make the process as efficient as possible.

Does anyone know a reason for the discrepancies between owner data, if I should trust the Driving for Dollars app data or the county record data? My instinct says that the county record data is likely the most accurate, but was curious too if anyone knew what the Driving for Dollars app uses for its skip tracing because I've been getting different results with my own skip tracing.

Appreciate any insights - thanks in advance!

Hi Yeury - congrats on graduating college, on your first multi-family deal, and to the great start to 2022! Sounds like you're well on your path to success!

I haven't done this myself, but from what I've read in David Greene's BRRRR book the best thing to do is to get a line by line bid using a template that you provide them with. Here is a sample template, you can make it more specific if needed and add things like labor hours: https://docs.google.com/spread...

Give the bid form to the contractor and have them fill it out with the work that needs to be done and the associated cost. Go over the bid line by line and decide what repairs you need to move forward with and what you don't need and remove the unwanted items from the bid. Once that is done, turn your bid into the contract by doing the following:

• Ask the contractor how long they think it'll take to complete all of the work. Ask them twice if they're sure. Tell them they'll get a 5% bonus if they finish at or before their completion date, but you'll subtract 5% if they're late, plus deduct another 5% for every additional week after that. Tell them that you need to be sure that they're not just telling you the completion date that you want to hear.
• Put the above clause (or similar) at the end of the bid form, add signatures, and that's your contract.