All Forum Posts by: Jonathan Greene

Zestimates are highly corruptible in completely valueless. When they get it right, it's only temporary. When you list a home as an agent on Zillow through your MLS, the day after it lists, it uses your own listing as a comp and the Zestimate goes way up. Within two days you can see a huge difference.

Online valuations should only be used for general reference and any of them that are fully available to the public and not linked to ALL of the MLS transactions are completely worthless. For licensed agents, RPR is by far the best tool because it gives you a range and also a break down of every house around it. I track my value on Zillow all the time, but more as a drinking game.

My best tip is to stop using the calculators and make friends with a local realtor who is also an investor. This way they won't mind taking you to see investment properties. The calculators mean nothing until you see what 100k looks like, 200k, and so on, and until you get familiar with what repairs are like in real life the calculator is just an old school video game.

Get your own buyer's agent. If you don't, you will get taken for a ride by the listing agent whose primary duty is to the seller. Yes, allowing them to double-end the deal can help you win, but not when you are new.

If you are going to live in the unit, you can go as low as 3.5% down for an FHA loan. If you are only looking for an investment, you will need 20% most likely. If your rental is set up the right way, you have the tenants pay for all of their expenses.

Too many new investors are spending too much time calculating properties online, but until you see them you don't know what figures really are. Also, the biggest problem with the calculator is that it will allocate a monthly allowance for repairs, but when you buy an investment property, something always breaks right away and it's big. So you need 5-10k reserves on any first deal to be safe and that won't be in the calculation.

@Gavin Welch good first part, definitely NO to mentors. They are all BS. But bad advice on Zillow preforeclosures. Those are complete garbage. They link every time a lis pendens is filed and most get resolved, but Zillow DOES NOT take them down once they are resolved so many, many homeowners who cleared up their quick debt get calls from people and it drives them crazy.

@Jessica Ribeiro, don't even think about wholesaling before you learn everything about it. It's not a great place to start and if you want to wholesale, you have to do a lot of steps to properly market for your best return. Go to local REI meetups in your area and don't buy in on what everyone tells you. Get cards, do research, and see how pans out to be what they say. Follow up with them and keep going and learning. Wholesaling can be very sketchy and you need to know all the ways it can go wrong before doing it.

This might help with finding an investor-friendly brokerage. I wrote it on here a couple of years ago, but it should still all be pretty on-point. https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/10015/64388-5-steps-to-finding-an-investor-friendly-brokerage

Don't discount what you can do with your license locally. OOS investing isn't going to what you think. You can use your access to find better markets near you. Too many people get licensed and don't learn how to do the job in their market and then when their friend wants to buy a house, they don't know what to do. Even if your goals are to invest, would you really pass on a commission if a friend wanted to buy a 500k house?

Don't let people convince you that you have to take any deal just because you are new and aren't sure what to do. You can always out-learn people on neighborhood dynamics, but becoming an expert driver in those areas. Once you see an area that looks promising, drive it every week and see what changes. Look for signs for new listings and whether they are flipped or sour. Look for signs of contractors out front, if allowed in your area. If you don't have a real estate license, it's harder to stay on top of the trends, but your eyes can always do the work. Let someone at an REI tell you the "best" market right now and then go 5 miles past that one. My pleasure, anytime.

@Dan H. what do you think about Escondido? Or even all the way out, Oceanside. I've held in Carlsbad, Encinitas, and San Marcos, but the prices are definitely high for first-time investors. I still think there are deals all over San Diego county, they just aren't on the MLS and don't have their hands up waiting for an investor. But when you find them, they will deal.

@Matt Hrachovy you can find deals out there. I know a few people who are flipping all the time and yes, they are not first-timers, but it's still possible. You will need at least 20 percent down if you aren't going to live there. If you are you could do much less.

@Josh Johnston if you are a new investor and a market is hot, it's not for you. A hot market means investors are already on it and therefore, prices for the dumps will have gone up. You want to find the market next to that or even next to that, one that carries the same potential trajectory as the hot market, just a bit further out. This should work in most areas, sometimes you have to go more miles than you had hoped, but at least you will be researching the next market while people with more money and experience are snapping all the deals in the hot market.

It's a mindset thing. You can't go to a meetup and tell someone you will invest anywhere if the cash flow is right. That's just asking for a "partner" who will sell you a bad deal. Too many new investors become almost desperate for their first deal when they still have limited funds to do the deal with. Everyone on here is in a rush to 100-units, but most people who try to go to fast are all broke now. Some have recovered from their mistakes and done it right on a second go.

Drive the neighborhoods. If there are lot of renovations going on, it's too late. Drive out one farther. And so on. Watch the prices decrease and the demand with it. Sure, if you have the money you can get into a hot market, but new investors overbid and under-estimate repairs and that does not go well.

@Cole Farrell here is an old blog post I wrote on here about 5 quick ways to find an investor-friendly agent. Maybe this will help a bit as well. https://www.biggerpockets.com/member-blogs/10015/64777-5-tips-to-find-an-investor-friendly-agent

@Jay Hinrichs do I have that? If I do, I don't even know about it. Maybe it's something with Premium now. I know I do get random contacts through BP so maybe I do have a contact button. 🤷🏼‍♂️

@Raul R. if you traveled to the areas and did the research and still go to the areas where your properties are, that's fine, as said in several responses. The post was for brand new investors who think they can invest OOS by looking on the computer and evaluating deals and then just making online contacts and hoping they pan out. Any investor who invests OOS and does ok, but who doesn't go and see the units often, is lucky and can be doing much better in the same area with more visits. Most OOS investors who stay hands-off lose money on PM and all repairs. It's SO easy to scam an OOS investor who doesn't pay attention. Just ask a million people who it happened to over and over again.