All Forum Posts by: Jason L.

 Nice tool, Luis. Funny thing is I entered my newest property first and it came back, "We're not taking new clients at this time." Then I tried my other property and got an instant quote for $50/month. I guess I'll talk to them and see what they can do.

Both houses have brand new roofs, so I definitely feel like I'm paying too much. I'll have to ask for a few more quotes. Thanks to everyone for their input.

I've been having some issues with some of the insurance quotes I've gotten on my properties lately. One one unit (a SFH), I have a fairly low deductible ($1000) but the monthly premium has gone up 20% in 2 years and now costs more than 1 month's rent (house rents for $1150, insurance quoted $1225). Then I have a duplex which is currently on a month-to-month plan where the premium is fairly reasonable ($1400/yr. while the 2 units rent for $2100) but the deductible is enormous ($5000 for most claims, $10k for hurricane wind damage).

I'm curious what others are paying for their insurance? Namely what is the ratio of rent price to yearly premium and what kinds of deductibles you are paying. 

Don't pay gurus. They're not helping you with your retirement; you're helping them with theirs.

If you're 100% confident that you could lose less money in 12 years of renting a house than you project the market to appreciate (and you're 100% deadset on Orlando), then I mean I guess you could do that. Consider the alternative though. What happens if the market turns the other way? Now you're underwater on your mortgage and you're losing money on the rental to boot. Does potential foreclosure sounds more appealing than trying to frontrun an appreciating market?

Best bet seems to be to find a shelter for your retirement money that's actually going to make you more money, even if that's not Orlando. Then in like 10 years when you're much closer to your retirement timeline, you could try to make a safer bet with more information instead of trying to prognosticate the real estate market 12 years into the future.

I don't know what tools you are using, but if you are an R user, there is a new package that was designed to scrape real estate data easily (I think he's scraping Zillow, but it's not written in the documentation). The package is called realtR, and you can check out the documentation here. I am not sure if this can be used on individual property data, but there is a host of macro-level data that may be of use.

I used a realtor who charged a $200 "out of state investor fee" to be paid at closing (on top of the sales commission). Basically just a premium for the realtor to walk properties, take a video, and do whatever other legwork might be needed. The fee only gets charged if a client closes, so I had no issue with it and I thought the price was fair.

I have an old cherry oak tree on one of my properties where one of the branches fell off last week. There wasn't a storm or anything. As far as the tenant knows, the branch just kind of fell naturally. I could have the whole tree removed for $500 more than just removing the debris, but I don't know anything about trees to know if that's actually worth it (even the tree contractor I want to use said he didn't think it was 100% necessary). Has anybody dealt with cherry oaks or any type of tree-related problems before?

Don't know of any software, but this sounds like something that could be engineered yourself in Excel fairly easily. If you're not too adept at modeling in Excel, then there's probably tons of tutorials you could watch on YouTube for inspiration. Might take a little enginuity on your part, but at least it'd be free.

Just think about that 275 number on your report logically. If you're buying it for 225 and planning to put zero work into it, then how is it suddenly worth 275? This is basically saying you're making 50k on paper just by putting your name on the deed. If this is true, then who cares if it cash flows? Just buy it!

Unless the seller has just fumbled the ask price to the nth degree here (I mean it does happen, but this would be pretty severe), then I think you might be skipping right to the "V" in "ARV" and ignoring the "AR" part.

You're buying the house for $225k, putting 0 into it, and it's instantly worth $275k? If that's true, then you better get it under contract before the seller finds this forum.

I'd say it's also a bit naive to expect the house to be perfect beyond pressure washing and carpet cleaning. You'd be surprised what people will live in, especially long-term owners/tenants who tend to neglect basic maintenance. For all you know, any or all of the roof, plumbing, and electric might need complete overhauls. If it's a frame house, then the wood could be rotted. These are things that are not visible to the naked eye. Maybe the house is perfect but are you prepared to handle something major if needed?

Considering your COC is like 170%, then there's still plenty of meat on the bone to buy it even if you needed to add $10k-20k in upgrades.

I mean I guess you're right, but the added cost of the hurricane insurance is such that if a hurricane DOESN'T rip my roof off within 5 years, then I've already paid the insurance company enough for a new roof just on the difference alone (the hurricane coverage was quoted to me at an extra $130/month, which is $7800 in 5 years. I literally just put a brand new roof on the same house for $6500).

I guess I'll reach out to some other investor friends I have directly about what they're doing because surely there is some sort of happy medium here. Thanks for the information.