All Forum Posts by: Katherine Rossell

welcome

@Brandon Battle if I don't look into this building, I could be missing out on a good deal. I don't necessarily think I am playing with fire if I navigate my way through this with protections. 

I will submit and offer through the realtor. One problem that I think could happen if the offer gets accepted is that the bank I am going to get my financing through will want an appraisal and the tenants are not letting anyone into the building. 

I can handle evicting tenants and completing gutting a building. The one thing I don't want to do is re wire the buildings electrical. 

One thing I was thinking about doing was offering an amount that I could cover in cash with the only condition being a good title search from my lawyer. This would keep my bank out of it which would mean that an appraiser going into the building is not necessary. The offer would be $34,000 less then the asking price. 

I have been watching this three unit on the MLS. It was going to be in a short sale. The sellers did not want to show people the building until they went through an eviction. I just got notice today that the sellers did not evict the tenants because they paid some of the rent and they are going to foreclose on the building.

Can I call the sellers bank and try to buy it from them? Do I need to wait for the house to be foreclosed? I am not familiar with auctions and would prefer not to buy a house through an auction. Should we submit an offer to the sellers and put some contingencies in there? What can those contingencies be? We still don't know what kind of repairs the building needs because we haven't been able to inspect the property. 

I am not as familiar with making offers to banks or sellers in a short sale. Any advice would be appreciated. 

Welcome to BP Josh and Autumn! My partner Derek and I are purchasing small multi family buildings in Northern VT. Right now we are concentrated in Lyndonville and St. Johnsbury. 

Keep us posted about your flips! I would love to hear how your plan moves forward. 

Even though this situation sucks... This is a good learning experience. Reflect on your interactions with your tenant and look at the systems you have in place. This could be helping you revamp your business in multiple ways.  I just learned some significant lessons the hard way that cost me over $3,000. Take all of the feedback that everyone has given and use it to your advantage. It is tuff to be a landlord and balance all of the things that need to be done. Now just move forward and keep chugging along.  

Right now my partner and I are grappling with a decision, and we could use your help!!! Any thoughts are good right now!

We purchased an REO duplex last October. Because of the condition I had to get the property with a variable rate commercial loan. Now that it is fixed up, I decided to refinance it to get a fixed rate conventional loan. We can take around $18,000 out of the equity in the house.

We put in an offer on a single family home that doesn't need any work. My calculations show that the cashflow would be around $400 a month. We could use the $18,000 to purchase this single family home, however the cashflow from the single family would almost be washed out by the added expense of the duplex thats including the taxes and insurance. 

I am waiting to hear back from my mortgage lender with the actual payment numbers for the loan. The numbers I provided are my assumptions based on previous conversations I have had with the lender. 

What should we do? Do we take money out of the refinance and buy the single family? Or do we just refinance and keep the loan where it is and continue to make the same cashflow on the property we have? 

Welcome to BP! Love to see more people from VT on this site! 

@Tom S. It is interesting to hear about your own experience. I honestly think I could have prevented this if I approached her differently when we inherited her from the seller we purchased the building from.

 Court went well today. The judge said she needed to pay $1300 plus her December rent into the court by December 1 and then we will take it from there. I am hopeful she will not have the money by then so they can order a Writ of Possession.

Oh and on a side note she told my lawyer he was harassing her when he went over to give her a notice for us to inspect her apartment for the damages she told me about on Sunday.  :) 

@Tom S. Thanks for checking in! Tomorrow is our rent escrow hearing in court. This tenant is proving to be a huge thorn in my side and trying to take digs at us. I am continuing to remind myself that I am learning throughout this whole process. Essentially I offered her $1300 plus waving all of her back rent which is $1600 if she packed up and left within two weeks. She did not take the offer. The Sheriff attempted to serve her 6 times, and on the last time he went to her work and she refused to take the notice. Then my lawyer field for a tack order through the court. The day before court (Today) my lawyer called me apologizing because he used a outdated summons. He said that if she shows up in court the judge will probably continue with the escrow hearing, however if she doesn't we will have to serve her again and then get a new court date. 

This story gets deeper!

Three weeks after we closed on the house, our apartment 2 tenants (who are great by the way) said that once the apartment 1 tenants moved out (we had the seller to that before closing because they were disgusting) cockroaches started to infiltrate their apartment. We got them some gel stuff which they said has been working. Then two days before this tenant starting flipping out on us because we are "discriminating" against her because we are asking her to pay her rent on time she told us of a roof leak and a plumbing problem. We had a plumber go out the next day and my partner who is in construction put new tin on the roof where there was damage within three weeks. We never went into her apartment at this time to inspect the leak because she was sending us in my opinion threatening tex messages. We should have let her know that we had repaired the roof but I didn't contact her because we were going through this eviction process. On Sunday two days before the court date, she sends me text messages with pictures of cockroaches in her kitchen and the water damaged roof in the kitchen she said that if it rains or snows hard the roof is going to cave in and endanger her family. Then she said that her daughters roof had started leaking also. 

I really have learned so much though this process and I am crossing my fingers that she will show up in court tomorrow and she will not have the money needed for the rent escrow court. I also hope that the judge will see that we have responding quickly to all maintenance complaints. I could not respond to her cockroaches because I just found out about them two days before court.