All Forum Posts by: Jennifer Petrillo

Thanks @J Scott @Craig Jeppesen @Tyler Erickson @Kenneth Garrett @Brian Pulaski great ideas, agree with all you said. Spoke with potential buyer last night, now the granite has turned into quartz lol. However, she does have a preapproval letter, she does have a down payment (she sold her last house last October and relocated and has been looking for a home since then), and she does not want to use a realtor, which would save us about $7000 and the hassle of listing the house. As Craig mentioned, stone countertops are probably worth a quick sale! Plus the market in our area is really flat now, the last two houses we sold took 3 weeks to go under contract and sold for many thousands less than we listed them for...a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush...she also said she would be willing to put down nonrefundable deposit toward the countertops in case she backs out, so it looks like we will move forward with that plan...I greatly appreciate everyone's advice!

There is a cluster of tile shops on Route 22 between Bound Brook and Plainfield, call them and ask their installation fees. Another cluster in the New Brunswick/Edison area. Just Googlemap tile shops in NJ and call them all! They may not have in house installers but they may have guys who leave their card there or buy a lot from them that they refer to.

Deep into Flip #4, potential buyer walked by this weekend and came inside, loves the house, called us today to say she wants it but...she wants granite countertops. Currently the countertops are off because we had to move out the cabinets to repair a very water-damaged kitchen floor. I was going to replace them with laminate because it is not a high end house--small 3/1.5 Colonial built in 1830, limited closet space, nonworking fireplace, etc. Just not the kind of house that calls for high end finishes. In fact, I thought stone countertops would look out of place because the rest of the house is very modest (simple but charming in an 1830 kind of way!). What have other rehabbers done in this situation? She is ready to make an offer but we don't want to be on the hook for granite countertops that we were not planning on buying in the first place in case she backs out. Do we have her buy them? Reimburse us at closing? Any thoughts? Thanks BP!

Hi Nelly, we don't get separate home inspections, we just walk through with our contractor and figure out what needs to be done. No need spending an extra $400 for someone else to tell you the same thing, our contractor does it as part of his estimate anyway! If there are things he is unsure about, we bring in that particular subcontractor to check it out (weird plumbing, have our plumber assess it, creepy wiring, have our electrician see it, etc.).

The only question to answer is how badly do you want this house? You said it is not an investment property, it is for you and your family. So only you can know what it is worth to you. Are you willing to lose this house over $16,000? We make embarrassingly low offers on our flips and simply walk away if they are rejected (until we make the same offer again a month later when no one has purchased the house!) But last year we made a generous bid on a short sale that we wanted for our own home. When the bank said there were other offers and asked for highest and best we made an even higher offer. Why? Because we didn't want to lose this house over 5 or 10K. Four months after making the offer we were told the bank accepted it.  Did we spend more than we really wanted to? Yes. Would we do it again? Absolutely, for the dream home we are now in.

A rental property is a business, not a charity.

I had a 203K loan on a house I lived in, an inspector comes out and determines what renovations need to be done, the work gets done and funded out of the loan after another inspection, which means your contractors have to wait a little bit to get paid (or you might have to pay some out of pocket to get them started on the job). But this loan is intended for owner-occupants, it is not for flipping houses with. You could use this type of loan on a house hack though to get started.

Welcome Chris, make sure you come to the Mid Atlantic Summit in Philly this Spring, an awesome weekend long real estate summit with hundreds of attendees and awesome speakers covering all aspects of RE investing. Dates TBA, watch BP or the Mid Atlantic Summit website for more info.

@David Olson, "The Math is Strong With This One"...well done, you set a goal, figured out in detail how to get there and saw that the numbers worked better with credit cards than HML, nothing wrong with that! More importantly, you already know how you are spending every penny of the profit--paying yourself back, paying off the (zero percent) debt and saving for the next one! I think growing up in a state of want/need makes us scrappier and not afraid of thinking outside the box to accomplish our goals.

@Andrea Hewitt, houses are sitting on the market for longer and selling for (sometimes a lot) less than asking price, we are in Hunterdon County and are getting the feeling that first time home buyers are not so interested in the suburbs anymore. Banks are getting greedier with the foreclosures, listing them pretty high and not leaving much profit margin for investors anymore. I don't know who's "making a killing" in this market, may have been some embellishing going on at that meeting. The low priced properties in my area need a ton of work, they have water damage, mold, bad septic systems, failed roofs, underground oil tanks, etc. Takes a lot to bring them back to life.

@Scott Allan, how are you making money on a 399K condo charging $2500 rent? That's not even one percent. What do your numbers look like?