All Forum Posts by: Jill Addison

@Alyssa Markowitz I own a couple rentals in Temple that I bought in the last year or so. I definitely recommend Isaac at real star properties for the property management. They're the biggest game in town and the best. They can tell you something about every single little pocket neighborhood there because they manage so many properties. And for a realtor I would recommend Ara McGregor +1 972-989-2057. She helped me buy both properties, and one of them was an off market deal that she hustled to get me for below market price. Good luck! I think Temple is an excellent place to invest.

@Troy Jones can you lend on properties in other states?

@Kole Moore Austin's market is super high so not a great place for investing at this point. But as you move out from Austin you can find great deals again. For instance, I've bought two 3/2 single family homes in the last year in Temple, Texas, a small town about an hour north of Austin, for $125,000 each. They rent close to the 1% rule, $1200 in rent each month, with a cash flow of about $400/mo before repairs and maintenance. But the disadvantage of Texas is the very high property taxes, compared to other states. That's why I probably won't be investing in Texas anymore. But I do think these homes will appreciate a lot, because they're in the corridor between Dallas and Austin and I think the population is going to grow a lot in the next few years.

@Nneka I. Well, it's been almost a month since I posted my response to your question here, and my three loans still are not closed. It has been so messy. We got all the way up to the final hour and then the wholesale lender said they didn't want to close them because they thought I was "shotgunning" a bunch of loans through the same time, and Fanny man Freddie Mac "red flagged" me. I didn't have enough rental history on each one and it was hard for me to supply the leases because there were four properties in play at once that I didn't own but I was in the process of buying. So at this point we've had to flip all my files over to a new wholesale lender and go through the whole underwriting process again. I'm not sure if I'll still get a favorable interest rate or not. I'm not even sure if these loans will close. But I'm still thinking they probably will. But they are closing literally a month later than the original closing date. Luckily my sellers are sticking with me, they could get out of the loan because I haven't been able to close it on time, but they're staying with me so that's good. Hopefully I will be able to close these in the next 2 weeks. Going forward, my approach will be to not have more than two loans and process at the same time.

@Darren Horrocks I agree with @Arlen Chou: I think it shouldn't be an either or but a both. I think it's definitely possible to buy good properties that cash flow AND appreciate. I used to think about it in this way too as far as trying to decide which was more important. But then it dawned on me that to have good cash flowing properties there has to be demand. To have demand there has to be population growth. When there's population growth there's appreciation. So they really do and probably should go together.

@Samantha Klein that's what I did, and this month I actually made about $40 because the actual usage was lower than the estimate.

@Karim Dallas-Newell I looked at some mobile homes too and at first I was kind of excited about it, but the more I read the more I understood why most people are not excited about it. The biggest thing is no appreciation. Without appreciation it just doesn't make sense to buy real estate. The other thing is you're buying very low end properties which will attract low end renters which will be more likely to damage your property and just not treat it well. Since mobile homes are not as sturdy anyway it's just a recipe for disaster in my opinion.

@Nneka I. I currently have three loans in process at the same time. I've been buying properties quickly and so it's getting a little hairy with providing all the paperwork they want. Some things they've been asking for for each property are: 1) note 2) copies of leases if they're currently rented 3) cancelled checks for the most recent month's rent 4) purchase and sale agreement for each property. The thing that's making it difficult is that some of these properties were estate sales and so the name on the purchase and sale agreement is not the same as the name of whoever was collecting rent checks, or whose name is on the lease, which is a problem for the lender because they need to be able to draw a straight line to correlate all the paperwork on one property. One person I'm buying from had the property for 30 years and can't even find her original leases. There are workarounds and ways to address all this, but when you multiply the number of properties with a number of issues and a short time frame to get it all worked out, it does get hairy. The other thing is you have to make sure that you have enough for all the down payments plus reserves to support multiple properties at the same time. I'm kind of seeing the wisdom of going a little bit slower so you can not have the lending situation be so crazy with multiple things in motion at the same time, plus I'm seeing that it would be wise for me to put the brakes on a little bit so I can make sure that all these properties will rent for what my property manager told they told me they would, before I keep going.

@Justin G. I worked with a mentor who is doing direct mail so I had letters mailed out for him. We got a lot of response, like 25 inbound calls. I don't believe we closed any of those deals, but that may have been due to closing skills or whatever. But for just getting a response, it worked. The key is to have a colored envelope and have it hand addressed. You can pay someone a small amount of money to hand it address the envelopes. This means actually writing the address by hand, not using a font that looks like cursive. That does not work. But if it's hand addressed, it will usually be opened. Then it's just a matter of how compelling is your letter writing and your offer, in order to get the inbound call. I think that mailing to people who have recently inherited a property might be the best way to go, because they are definitely motivated to just get rid of it most of the time. They just want an easy solution to get rid of the property and they're often not even looking for top dollar.

@Jeff Morelock I've been beat out on a couple deals in the last few months by buyers who waived the inspection. It just makes it so much more likely to close without having to come down on price that it's hard for sellers to resist that offer.