All Forum Posts by: Jesse Tsai

As far picking which materials, this would depend on what kind of buyer you will market your property to.

For a more discriminating buyer, you may want to consider higher end fixtures.

On the flip side, for entry level homes, inexpensive contractor grade materials will work just fine.

Its always at your discretion. You're their customer. You tell them what you want done.

For us, bedrooms are really easy. As long as there is a reasonably easy way to add a closet, and a window to the outside world, we just throw up some studs, drywall, texture, paint, and install a door, and we have a new bedroom.

Putting up walls and doors typically run us about $500-800 total.

Bathrooms are a different story. Those require moving some plumbing, and some permitting.

Those are hard to throw numbers around on.

Just keep practicing, and with time and experience, you'll be able to nail it with reasonable accuracy.

Some tips I would suggest:

Be able to eyeball the square footage of an area.
Get to know how much things like flooring and paint cost per square foot.

With those two, you just multiply the cost per sqft by the number of sqft that needs work for a quick estimate

Get to know how much it costs to replace common fixtures such as plumbing, electrical etc.

Once you have those down along with a few other things I may be leaving out, you can quickly add up all the line items to come up with an estimate.

My partner, assistant, and I can quickly come up with a repair estimate off pictures alone, but thats after a lot of practice.

90% of my deals are in town, and I employ an assistant to manage them.

I do have quite a few deals that are spread out around the country. While the margins are currently much better out of state than they are here in Vegas, I do lose a lot of home field advantages.

I have to find and depend on other companies to manage the properties and vendors. They typically don't care about my money as much as I do.

Every market/jurisdiction has different conditions and laws that I may not be used to.

As far as getting properties spread out through out the country, I lose the economies of scale of having all the properties in one locale.

On the bright side, the margins tend to be much better out of state, and the learning process really makes it worth it for me.

For our flips, we use Affinity Group, affinitygm.com, ( no relationship, other than as customer) .

For $150K vacant flips, we pay around $70-75 / month.

They work really well because we just submit the properties we sold and bought once a month, and everything is automatically covered.

Deshone Drummond, I think having the employee work from home, and submitting daily reports of what they completed that day is better than investing in office space for one employee.

As far as outsourcing to an outside company or person (non-employee), Elance.com or odesk.com are my recommendations. They work for a very reasonable (actually very cheap) rate, and do good work.

As others have said, this really depends on the market you're in, and how discriminating the buyers for your properties will be.

For the sake of simplicity, we generally use just one paint scheme on every home we do:

Mushroom Bisque #UL140-10 on the walls
Semi-gloss in the wet areas, eggshell everywhere else

We have that color matched with Speedwall paint. BEHR is ridiculously expensive.

Semi Gloss pure white on all trims, baseboards, and doors.

Justin's idea of looking at model homes is brilliant, copying others ideas is much cheaper than creating your own ideas.

We bring varying denominations of cashiers checks, and if we pay more than what we bid, the trustee sends a refund check with the deed.

You want to read the cc&r's. This is essentially the rule oil for the HOA. You also want to read the most recent reserve study, and compare that to the reserve account to make sure the HOA can pay for major repairs when theyre projected to come up.

The state law you were referencing is NRS 116, article 4.
You may want to take a quick read through that chapter so you can familiarize yourself with what HOA's can and can't do.

Go to Elance, post what you want, and you'll get several dozen proposals within a day or so.