All Forum Posts by: Jennifer Petrillo

Suzie Agelopoulos course and Richie Matthews course.

@Brooklyn McCarty, where do you find the digital coupon book?

You guys are all so awesome, thank you for your input. @Steve Vaughan, you are so right: "Funny how the cash vs leverage discussions fail to mention costs and hassles like these." In fact, I've decided to go ahead and purchase this one with cash, I am selling 3 small MFs in Ohio and was going to use leverage to try to scale up but the costs/fees are just outrageous right now, it is more advantageous for me to buy this with cash and rehab it out of pocket then refi. It will actually save me thousands of dollars. Leverage is costlier/more of a hassle than using my own money!

Some input please...I have a 3/2 SFR on one acre in San Marcos TX under contract. Was getting a rehab loan for purchase price 170K plus 20K of rehab funds with plan to refi out once rented, planning to hold on to the property long term (a BRRR). Lender told me he was having trouble finding an appraiser in the area ("no one wants to go out there") so I made some calls. Was quoted $1000...higher than I am used to seeing from when we were flipping houses in central NJ a few years back. But wait--closing is in a few weeks, to "rush" the appraisal will cost me an additional $800 (otherwise I will have it at the end of October). But wait, there's more--after tacking on additional fees from the "Nationwide Appraisal Network" (which apparently reviews all appraisals? Never heard of this) the cost is now a whopping $2400!! I am going to make some more calls but I thought I might win some kind of a prize for posting the highest ever appraisal fee on BP. Oh, and as for "having trouble finding an appraiser in the area," San Marcos is in between Austin and San Antonio, two booming markets. It's not in the Arctic Circle. What is up with this??

I started using Expensify app to keep track of rental unit costs/spending and taking pictures of paper receipts, works OK so far, hoping at tax time it can be easily downloaded and divided by categories. Now looking for a time tracking app to keep track of my REPS status. What is everyone using? I can't stand spreadsheets, want something that is easy to enter and understand when I go back to look at it later. Currently using paper and pencil! (which I actually don't mind, I'm just trying to join the 21st century)

We had to raise our rental age to 30 after a 26 year old hosted a Memorial Day weekend party at our STVR. She sounded so nice on the phone, it was going to be her and her sister for a weekend out of the city; then my housekeeper called and told me she filled 7 large garbage bags with trash from the home (for a three night stay!), including empty cases of beer, and the kitchen fire extinguisher was missing. Turns out the kitchen fire extinguisher had been discharged into the backyard fire pit! When I confronted the renter, she said they wanted to go to bed so they had to "put out the fire." (Apparently using the hose on the side of the house didn't occur to them) Then we started hearing from neighbors about all the cars that were parked up and down our street and that they brought 4 wheelers and rode them down the dirt road to the shared lakefront! I was mortified and spent a lot of time smoothing things over with the other homes we share the lake with. I got the renter banned from the rental site, got reimbursed for the fire extinguisher, raised the age limit to 30, max of four adults and max of two cars. I was a little frustrated that our caretaker (who lives right down the road) didn't call me and tell me while it was happening because I would have called the police and had them all thrown out. I also had to explicitly add "No ATVs, no 4 wheelers" etc to the listing and also a sentence along the lines of "This is a quiet and respectful community and we expect guests to behave accordingly." We're also going to change minimum required length of stay for this summer (maybe 5 days min). Have thought about adding cameras or a Ring doorbell but we have spotty coverage up there so might not be worth the hassle. 

Expensive properties, high property taxes, negative migration...I don't know how some people make it work.

Physician here. Vaccine is safe. mRNA technology has been around for more than a decade and has been used in other vaccines. Over 40K Americans received it during clinical trials. 8 million doses now administered with no surprises. The vaccine is a sequence of about a dozen base pairs of synthetically created genetic code in a lipid carrier base, your cells take up the sequence of code and make antibodies in response to it. What are they making antibodies to? The spike protein on the surface of the virus that allows COVID to gain entry into your cells! Then your body just clears the foreign material the way it does any foreign material, it is not being "incorporated" into your DNA in any way, just giving the message to your DNA of what to code for. How did get on the market so fast? (This is another common concern of those who are "vaccine hesitant") For the last year, every lab, every scientist, all the money has flowed to this one goal of vaccination so we can end this pandemic, a lot of red tape was removed and everything was fast tracked, allowing R&D and manufacture and distribution in record time. Freaking awesome. Not having to grow the virus in eggs (like the flu vaccine) also saved a ton of time (and a ton of eggs). Share with your tenants (if you care to) that you got vaccinated and were not afraid to, many people are just waiting to see if everyone around them starts dropping dead or twitching or speaking in tongues when they get vaccinated. When they realize that's not happening, they may reconsider. Overall, the risk of vaccination is much lower than the risk of COVID, as we are finding more and more long term damage from the virus that will have untold effects on many people for years to come (not to mention the high mortality rate in certain demographic groups). The risks don't even compare. Risk of contracting and spreading and becoming sick from COVID is much, much higher than any vaccine risk. You can also influence people with comments such as, "I sure can't wait until this pandemic is over and life can go back to normal, I missed some great concerts last summer and have my fingers crossed that none of the musicians I am holding tickets for drop dead before I can see them!"

Getting lots of PMs about where in Ohio I invest--here is the wholesaler I use: Kara_sells_cle at gmail to get on her mailing list

We just bought two triplexes and a duplex in a small city (67K) outside of Cleveland. Decided not to buy in Cleveland because it was just too massive, too much income disparity and lots of unsalvageable areas. The town we are in is working class, older and homogeneous housing stock, half the population is renters. Mix of manufacturing, medical, service and white collar jobs. Lots of decent working people who just want a clean, safe place to live, happy to pay rent on time and the cost of entry for an investor was pretty low. We had five existing tenants with three vacancies when we bought the properties, got 50 inquiries for the three apts we had to fill, lots of people clamoring for decent housing out there.