All Forum Posts by: John Mason Wallace

Thanks guys, but it looks like the land is too costly for a duplex. Time to make way for the four-plex (or two duplexes really).

Problem is I'm having difficulty finding a contractor now. Most of the contractors on google are the very professional but expensive re modelers and custom home builders.

I'll try to come by.

What time?

There's still hundreds of acres of empty space in Charlotte left from a century of decay and disinvestment. Thankfully, many of the sites are marked for new apartments.

They just held the first meetings for rebuilding the Brooklyn neighborhood. I'm genuinely looking forward to it.

Smaller scale operators can find work in the inner ring of neighborhoods though, but the land is getting very expensive.

I'm seeing people trying to rent their homes at around 1400K which is rent I need but their charging only about 1.20$ a square foot. I need around 1.60$ a square foot.

My target return on investment is about 9% but the numbers are against it.

".... great tenant and have some maintenance free years at the beginning". Good lord don't assume that.

I'm looking to start building "missing middle" housing in the Belmont neighborhood of Charlotte, NC. It's one of the few pockets of the inner neighborhoods that are affordable.... though, that's quickly changing. The lots are now going around 100,000K a lot.

A shotgun styled duplex might do the job, a little less than 900 per unit. I can get the architectural drawings for around 1500$.

The one issue is I'm having trouble getting an idea of what the costs for building a duplex are. I'm looking at around $110 per sf, though I'm hoping it could be a bit cheaper.

Hello,

I'm hoping to start building productive places in the Queen City.

I was studying in SCAD when I took a few too many architectural history courses. From then I learned about sprawl, then Congress for New Urbanism, then the Small Developers group.

Charlotte is the queen of sprawl, but she has a ring of excellently laid out neighborhoods. The future of the city will be in it's downtown core and inner neighborhoods.

I want to slowly build up my portfolio starting from the duplex then on up, contributing to these neighborhoods along the way. Walkable urbanism is in such great demand but the supply is just not there.

Transit is abysmal, zoning is awful, but I see the winds of change coming.

My family is in real estate, but mostly related to sprawl. At one point they managed a shopping center on Independence. When they saw East Charlotte start to go into decline, and NCDOT start tearing up the road and turn it into an awful highway, they packed up and invested further out.