All Forum Posts by: Joe M.

I'm hoping to close on a duplex in the next week or so (I hope). One of the units has a washer/dryer in it that apparently the previous tenant or owner left behind.

This got me to thinking about potentially offering to rent washers/dryers in all my units. Anyone ever done that or had any success?

I'm kind of shying away from it at the moment because I don't like the idea of lugging appliances all over the place and possibly playing Maytag repair man.....but if there is money to be made???

I was generic with mine. The first property I was interested in buying was on Cree Street. So I named my LLC CreeStreet,LLC. Interestingly I never bought the place that was actually on Cree Street but the name is generic enough I could pretty much do anything I wanted with it.

I say go for it. It's the nice and considerate thing to do. When I'm renting out a new place I always leave gift basket of assorted coffee/choclates etc. in the house. It doesn't cost me much of anything in the scope of things and it is a nice little house warming present.

"I don't really have a job.....but my parents give me money all the time"

"I'm looking for a place for me and my baby's daddy for when he gets out of jail"

"If I give you a deposit now can you hold this place until May?" (This was in January)

Generally speaking the price of rents charged are generally associated with the number of bedrooms.

So in your example, yes you would charge less for a 1 BR than you would for a 2 BR. Of course there are about a thousand different scenerios that could change that, but for the most part it holds true.

My experience in the region I invest is this. You can basically divide the region into one of three types of areas:

1.) Warzone - This is where the bulk of the crime is. In my situation the closer you get to the center of downtown the higher the crime rate and the more likely I would classify an area as a warzone.

2.) Transitional area/Working Class area - This is the transition area between warzones and the suburbs. The closer you get to the warzone area the lower the cost of housing and higher the risk. The closer you get to suburbs the higher the cost of housing and lower risk.

3.) Suburbs - Middle/Upper class neighborhoods. These are the furthest from city center. Low crime rates, better schools etc.

My bread and butter is in the transitional areas, but you have to be careful. It is much more likely that a "working class area" can quickly become a "warzone" the closer it is to the city center.

As an investor though I feel like I can make a difference in that regard and I feel like the work I've done with my buy/hold strategy has helped stave off a transitional area becoming a warzone. This is especially the case when I can focus on acquiring several properties in close proximity to each other. It's amazing how much the neighbors will love you because they recognize that the work you're doing also helps their home values and helps to keep crime at bay.

Some good advice given already. I'll add my 2 cents because I'm still relatively new only being in this game for a few years now.

When I looked at getting into the real estate business I first thought about my goals, what did I want to do? In my situation I had been investing my savings in the stock market and the ups/downs of that crazyness was just not fun.

So I started looking at real estate. Why? I was watching this documentary on the Great Depression of the 20's. In this documentary they talked about the massive amounts of wealth created by just a few individuals. That's not a typo, that's a fact....wealth. The "robber baron's" like J.P. Morgan and Carnegie and Standar Oil all built the beginnings of their massive industrial empires during the great depression. How? Simple, the waited for the weaker competitiors to go belly up and then bought them out of bankruptcy for penny's on the dollar. When the economy recovered they were some of the richest men on the planet.

Take a look at what is happening in real estate now. The markets have crashed and are severely depressed in some areas. I looked at this and saw opportunity, not despair. My logic is that people still need places to live. Just because the market has busted and people are losing their homes to foreclosure doesn't mean that these people simple disappear....they have to live somewhere right?

So my strategy has been to purchase foreclosed properties for penny's on the dollar in working class neighborhoods. I then rennovate them and use a rent/hold strategy. I like this for a couple reasons. First on every property I own I will recoup my initial investment in rents paid in around 5 years. Secondly, the prices are so cheap that there really is nowhere for the value to go but up. If I hold the properties for a few years or more I can likely sell the property for a significant profit.

A good example of this. The very first house I bought I paid $23,000 for. I put about $5,000 into it. It was an all cash deal so my all in costs are $28,000. I've had the same tenant in this house for 2 years and have received $15,600 in rent over those same 2 years. Now the tenant is interested in buying the house from me. We ran the comps on it and the house comps out at about $50,000 now. So if I do sell it to her I'm looking at a gross revenue of $22,000 ($50,000 selling price less $28,000 investment cost) from the sale of the house and $15,600 from rents received for a total gross revenue of $37,600.

I'll probably pay around $1,500 on commissions and taxes/insurance have cost me around $3,000 over 2 years and probably about $1,000 in misc. repairs over 2 years. All told I'll walk away with a net profit of around $30,000 on this house with a buy/hold/rent for a few years strategy. This is what works for me. You just need to find your niche and work it!

They still will drill a hole somewhere to run the cable into the house unless they can piggy back on some other existing hole. My experience has been that the installers would rather just bust out the hammer drill and go strait through the wall rather than taking the time to do things tidy.

I hate those things. The installers will take the path of least resistance to install the dish and usually that means drilling holes through the roof/walls/block etc. Very rarely do they seal the holes properly and they've just created a vector for water intrusion.

I've purchased 2 HUD homes and in both cases I just waited out the "exclusive" period that was set so that only O/O could make bids. The day that both of them went open for all bidders I put a lowball bid in and won both of them.

Now, I ran into a situation on 3 or 4 others where an investor purchased during the O/O period. I know that this happened because one of the houses was just a few streets over from a rental I currently own. I watched as he closed the deal, did some minor work to the house and within 30 days of closing the deal had it up for rent.

I did report the situation to HUD. While I don't agree with the policy it is unfair to everyone if a select few individuals are breaking the law and essentially taking advantage of those investors who are ethical.

I would also be suspect of any realtor who is working with an investor that is doing this because certainly they must be aware of what the investor is doing if they've closed on more than one transaction together.