All Forum Posts by: Jonathan Greene

Take it from somebody who loved Strawberry Mansion for a long time. It's still a needle in a haystack area. You can make money there, but it's hard money, and it's not forgiving if you get it wrong. The best opportunities in the Mansion are the parts where it borders an area that is at higher scale in my opinion.

Where is the benefit to the end buyer here? All end buyers can see it on the market now and can buy it direct so what would the point be of you locking it up on assignment and then asking people to come back and buy it when they already could have bought it without paying you spread in the middle.

If you "need" to get five listings, you won't get them. The secret to getting listings is not needing them. People can smell commission breath. Good listings are a people game, not anything you have at the bottom of your post. Those are spray and pray techniques that don't fit with sellers right now because sellers/owners are sitting on a very low rate and don't want to move to go up 4-5 points on their rate.

Listings aren't a start now thing as well. Listings come from nurturing your database for years, so if you are new, you have to pick a niche or an area that you have a competitive advantage in. Why would someone want to list with you when there are a million other realtors? If you know that, you have a start.

When you make a post like this, you are going to get a lot of pitches and that means many fake gurus. Mentors are found by going to real estate investor meetups for six months to a year without an ask and seeing who you get along with and want to learn from. You also need to identify what you have to offer to the equation. The best mentors aren't paid (coaches are paid), they are people who want to help you because you are interested in them and have something you can do for them that they can't do themselves.

Have you ever hosted or co-hosted a property? It sounds like you haven't and if that's so, what is your pitch to an investor? It can't be low price because that means low service. It's very hard to learn on the fly without the experience and also ask people to trust you before you have proof of concept. I think it's because you are looking at the hosting business as the catalyst to make money to invest. That's a poor why. To be a good co-host, you have to be focused on the person you are co-hosting for and firstly, the guests.

That strategy is not going to work. You need to take a break and rethink what you are trying to accomplish. You already know there are no deals out there in the price point and strategy you want, but you are asking people to serve you some. They will, but they won't be good deals. They will be bad deals that you are asking people to tell you that they work. BRRRR is very hard everywhere now because the model doesn't make sense with interest rates this high. Also, with low inventory, it's hard to get the groundswell for a quick out value because the comps aren't there.

Any time someone comes into the forums and asks for deals anywhere that work, they are setting themselves up to get pitched disasters.

LPs vet the operator first, not the deal. The numbers are just that - numbers. Until you see the property in person the numbers are completely meaningless unless you have a working relationship with that listing broker for years. Everyone is hiding something at scale so when you just operate based on the numbers, you miss the whole show. That's my point.

When you say you want to prioritize cash flow over equity, you want to watch out for people honing in on that and selling you "good cash flow" deals which will be in D neighborhoods and will come with high capital expenditures and harder tenancies. There are towns that are not too far where there could be some options for you, but I would start going to real estate investor meetups and pair that with books and podcasts. You have to earn a mentor by showing up a lot and then your mentor will appear. If you ask for one too soon, people will just try to sell you on stuff that looks good and isn't.

I would just be careful hopping back in now as interest rates and low inventory are making it very difficult if you aren't finding your own off-market options to buy. I would get back to local real estate investor meetups so you can connect with locals to the area and kind of get back in the game slowly that way.

There isn't enough information in here about the current state of the house to be able to advise you, but I would think #3 is a definite no as it seems unnecessary from a cost perspective although that market has scale to accept it. Are you sure you can add 2,000 SF on such a small lot? I don't think that seems likely. With the limited info, I would say #1 is your smartest option but there are a lot of variables missing.