All Forum Posts by: John Baeten

I have found a property for sale by owner in my area from Zillow.com. It also appears on other MLS sites, but no site lets me contact the seller – they all point me to a realtor when I click on the contact button. I am unable to find the property on the site forsalebyowner.com.

I would like to deal directly with the seller and not use a realtor to get more information about the property. I would think I could possibly have more leverage dealing directly with the seller.

In looking more into the property, I have found the owner’s name and then doing a look up I might have his current address (he does not live at the property). My question is how far should I go with this? If he did not list it on forssalebyowner.com – maybe he doesn’t want to be contacted directly? I understand Zillow.com and other sites like that must make some of there money by sending potential buyers to realtor’s that have been pre-selected. Or should I go all out and get his phone number and try to contact him that way?

Any thoughts on this would be great, and as always thank you very much for you help/ideas.

@Luka Milicevic the reasons we thought about the HML for this situation was 1) as far as I could find online it looked like the closing costs would be cheaper than a normal mortgage (this might not be correct but it is what I was going with). 2) I did not feel the odds of finding anyone that would like to be another partner in this deal would be good. All we have is a idea - not much else to prove anything right now. 2a) If we did find a partner then I really wouldn't be needed in this equation. Which could be good or bad. Maybe I just try to go on my own and look for a single family property.

@Dan Beaulieu A follow up question with the LLC and a commercial lender. Can you even get a loan for an LLC if it is just created and does not have any value – or proof of income coming in? All we would have would be the figures on the property to show that it is currently making money and we plan on keeping it doing that after we purchase it.

Thank everyone for their response. I will try to put all the answers that I have for everyone here. Please let me know if you have any other questions – as I am new and just trying to do this right – or at least more right than wrong.

For the partnership I trust my friend we have known each other for almost 30 some years. He is even married to my cousin. So, I think we have a very good foundation on that – but I do agree we need to get it all in writing to make sure we are all on the same page at all times.

For searching for properties, we are just looking at the basic sites (Zillow.com, realtor.com & crexi.com). I know there are others, and probably better but this is what I had to work with for now. From these sites I have not found many duplex or larger for the 200k range. I am just looking now on Zillow and only see 4 in the while city of Bowling Green.

Hello community,

I am new to real estate investing and have an interesting question which I hope someone can help me out with or at least point me in the correct direction. This might be more of a what would you do in this situation?

I have a friend that sold a rental property and now has a 1031 exchange for 240k that he would like to get invested before taxes are due. The property was sold on the 8th of August for a point of reference on the timing. He does not have the best credit but the cash, I do have good credit. I am from Nashville TN, and my friend is from Green Bay WI. He is not interested in purchasing any property in Wisconsin because of the high property taxes compared to other states. We are looking in the area of Bowling Green KY as the prices in Nashville are quite high currently. We are planning on doing a partnership on this property. We are looking for properties that do not need much/any cosmetic work and is ready to rent.

What we would like to do is use his 240k for a down payment on 3 or 4 unit property (maybe if it worked out two of them), then use a hard money lender to get the remaining money needed to purchase the property. Then within three months or a year do a refinance on the property and use the money we get out to pay off the HML and then he can get a portion/most of his original investment out of the property.

We did not create an LLC yet and when I spoke with some of the hard money lenders that is a requirement. But then a normal bank would not do a conventional mortgage for an LLC property. At least that is what I was told when I contacted two of them.

I guess my main question is – does this sound like a correct way of doing this? Our thinking is if we went to get a mortgage on the property right away his money would be tied up for years (thinking 6k for closing costs, it would not pay to pay that again in a year or two to get the money out). Should we go the LLC way or is there a better way out there for this situation? Any help or ideas would be great!!