All Forum Posts by: Jody Sperling

Look for a handyman. Use your local Real Estate Investors groups. Ask the network of investors who does good basic home repairs and call those people. Provide a list of maintenance and get a quote. 

If you aren't connected to your local REIAs, use this next period of occupancy to get connected. Having access to that crowd makes a huge difference in the quality of work you can find and the cost of repairs.

Best of luck!

Any house you hack, find a local (not national) bank who will give you a First Position HELOC. Use that HELOC like your checking account. Put all your savings, all your earnings, all you payments inside it.

Because the HELOC is a revolving line of credit, you can put in and take out money as needed, and most people are able to pay off a house in 5 to 7 years with this method while not changing any of their spending or saving habits. If you get the account on a house that you hack, you can likely pay the property down to nothing in 3 to 4 years. I've done it, and seen others do it.

Of course, because you'll want large cash reserves for building your portfolio, you can tap into those funds in the HELOC to buy more property, but in the meantime, you create more equity.

Best of luck!

Three to five properties per LLC is adequate if LLCs are your thing.

LLCs are overrated. Don't let it stop you from investing. If you get one, many people put around three properties in each LLC, but if someone wants to sue you, they can find your LLCs, and chances are a decent lawyer can find the cracks in the business structure.

If you want to protect your assets, get good insurance, and invest in an umbrella policy that covers the millions. Then, when you get sued, insurance will do its job. But don't let LLCs hold you back like so many people do. Best of luck!

It's more important that the list you mail is well-developed. People will change over time so you may hit one property whose owner wants to hold for years, then on the tenth mailing decides to sell. Consistency is the key. Don't decide for the market. Just show up and do the work.

But, if you are mailing lists of all majority owners instead of targeting tax lists or preforclosures or some other kind of motivated metric, don't expect to have much success. So first, ensure you're mailing to the best list. Then, just mail out on a consistent basis. Best of luck!

If someone is bringing 100% of the money you are a property manager and not going to find anyone who wants to split equity with you just for telling them what to buy.

However, if you find a deal that costs 50k, manage a rehab for 40k, and refinance the house for 150k, then it's completely fair to expect to split the profit 50/50. In that case if you kept in 20% equity on a flip and hold, renting it out, Then it'd be perfectly fair to have 50/50 ownership.

As a rule, any dollar that a partner leaves in a deal is a dollar equal to his percent ownership, and you shouldn't expect to earn equity through sweat alone.

Most importantly, though, get documents, iron-clad documents that detail how your partnership will work, what happens when it ends, who gets what, how each partner gets what is owed and what the resolution of the partnership will look like. The more thorough this imagining is, the better your life will be. Every partnership ends, but not all partnerships end well. Make sure yours does! Best of luck!

That sounds more complicated than it needs to be. Why not find a private lender to cover the costs? If not private money, you should be able to find a hard money lender who will cover the purchase and rehab if your numbers are well dialed in.

Dealing with a bank at that stage of the loan process is sure to slow things down and cost you necessary time and energy. If you don't know where to look for hard money, you can start with a simple internet search "[name of town] hard money lender".

Then make a few calls, get an idea what people charge, and if they expect you to have some capital up front, and go from there. Best of luck!

This is so amazingly thorough, it blows my mind. Just tucked it away in my folder of REI resources. Thanks for the thoughtful post!

 @Matthew Paul, I know it wasn't planned to be a wholesale, and you did some work on it, which is why I called it a wholetale. Kind of a mashup between a wholesale and a really fast flip. I don't think the term is too rare. I googled it and found folks discussing it. Sorry if I somehow offended you.

If clearing 30k in a month is barely a base hit, give me a call. I'll take 30k a month any month, every month. :) Congrats to your friend on the wholetale. That's the power of real estate so so so many ways to make money!