All Forum Posts by: Joe Henry

Hey Carl, very interesting stuff. I haven't had luck other than a few personal websites of people who have tracked this stuff themselves for their particular towns, but nothing even for Jacksonville, where I'm looking. But maybe that means there is someone in your area who has the data. If you go to your local RE Investor Association, maybe some older experienced people who have been investing since the 70s or 80s have that data?

Please let me know if you find anything. I'll do the same.

To follow up with the suggestions made here I've uploaded a new version: https://www.biggerpockets.com/files/user/JoeH29/fi...

1. Added instructions page
2. Added monthly cap ex row
3. Added explanations to some of the rows in Deal Evaluation  
4. Added Permits and Inspection costs to the up-front cap ex calculations 

@Immanuel Sibero,

- First point. Thank you for bringing this up. Yes, I am missing a place in monthly expenses for cap ex. There are two types of cap ex expenses - the ones going into the project up front (e.g. the house needs a new roof immediately) and the ones you need to save for monthly, (e.g. in 5 years it will need a new water heater). So the cap ex I have listed is for the up front cost, costs you know you'll have just by purchasing the property. Thus, they are added to the all-in figure and CoC. You can either factor monthly cap ex into the monthly repair row, or add a row for saving monthly income for future cap ex. I think I will update the sheet to have it's own monthly cap ex row.

- Second point. Yes it's very detailed haha. I am new to RE as well, so I wanted to make a sheet that would help prevent me from overlooking things, thus the amount of detail. You can just add a number in the column next to each cap ex section heading (e.g. B13 for demo), instead of filling out all the items in each section. That way you can do ball-park estimates for each cap ex category.

@Christian Costa, thanks! I think I need to add some instructions maybe about how the three pages in the workbook interact, and do please let me know if there's anything else you notice.

One thing I remembered is not included is cost of construction inspections and permits in the Cap Ex sheet. Don't forget those if you need them ;)

@Joe Splitrock, thanks for the advice.

@Christian Costa, the number from B41 should be a negative value. If you enter a percentage for management you'll see the calculated management cost is a negative number because it's an expense. All the other expenses you enter should be negative numbers, not positive, which will make B41 a negative number.

If you use the form this way the NOI formula is correct. If you like using positive numbers for the expenses though that's fine (it is easier to enter positive numbers there), and then you could change your formula for NOI to what you posted above.

Thanks for asking though, hope you get some use from the spreadsheet.

@Michaela G., I don't know why you are insinuating feelings. But I do appreciate your thoughts on my original question regardless, so thank you.

I just went to one of these the other day. They gave a lot of misinformation about how tax liens and tax deed purchasing works. They try to make it sound very difficult for you to pursue by yourself. Here in Duval County, the county makes it very easy - everything is done online.

Then they try to sell you on purchasing a 1k membership to their club, which is usually like 2k or something, and you can only get the deal that day! Turns out you can go to any of their other seminars and get the same exact 1k deal.

I wouldn't recommend doing it, ask you can get a great education from books, real relationships and networking, and online. But if you do do it, don't worry about the "deals" they offer. Go home afterward and do your homework to see if what they said is true.

I would also argue that it does matter what prices were 10 or 15 years ago. If you know that a property was purchased for 100k during the height of the bubble, and a seller is asking 100k now, you are most likely overpaying - maybe not overpaying by market price, but by true value, yes.

This is not how successful investors make their money - they don't buy good deals for the market, they buy good deals, period. Deals that are judged good by true value.

@Michaela G.,

this has nothing to do with computers. It simply stands to reason that if a buyer paid fair price (fair market price) sometime in the history of the market, and you know the historical values of the market and where the market is now, then you can use that to calculate fair price now. Of course there are other factors (home improvements, etc), but this is just a general estimate. This is simple math.

I do not consider finding the fair market value of a property a waste of time. If you do, you are welcome to purchase properties without knowing that. I know about comps, but I'm asking for something different in this particular thread, for my own reasons.