All Forum Posts by: Brant Richardson

Your thinking is right.

Are you looking at ARV for the sake of doing a refinance later to pull your money out?

As far as "the pains of renting 4 separate units", most people want to make at least $100 cash flow per unit, which your building will easily do if those numbers do not include utilities. Check the property tax too. One bedroom units tend to have a lot of turnover and management needs.

Rental demand is high here so open houses have worked well for me. I just advertise it on Craigslist, with the address listed, a 4 hour time block, on the weekend. Like others have said, have a clipboard to take notes on because it all becomes a blur. I write down the persons name along with some notes that I don't let them see like "the guy with the crazy hair and leopard skin pants", whatever will jar my not so great memory. I leave the applications out for everybody to take so I don't appear to be discriminating.

If you believe appreciation and inflation will happen then leverage is the way to go.

Scenario #1 Own a single 100k house outright.

Scenario #2 Own 5 100k houses with 20k down on each.

If you have appreciation of 10%, scenario #1 gains 10k in equity and scenario #2 gains 50k in equity.

With inflation, the debt you owe in scenario #2 will be worth progressively less.

Interest rates are low now. The government just printed a whole lot of money so inflation should follow. On a long enough time line there will be appreciation anywhere I am considering investing. So I think its a good time to leverage out.

My plan is to try to leverage 10 properties. From there I can concentrate all the cash flow on paying down one loan at a time or saving for all cash purchases. I don't see this as real risky if each property has solid cash flow.

100k rehab? It must be very ratty. It doesn't have to make sense, most "deals" don't.

There are a lot of posts and podcasts which cover direct mailing to generate leads.

A lot of Californians invest out of state. There is a meetup of So Cal investors who invest out of state coming up, no date set yet but monitor this post:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/517/topics/110489-bp-meetup-in-la-for-those-interested-in-out-of-state-investing?page=2

Actually I kicked myself for not going to nursing school for a long time. My wife and I graduated at the same time. She went to nursing school at the city college which cost a few thousand dollars. I went to PA school and ended up with $80k in student loans. We started working at the same time and she has consistently made more than I do and currently makes a LOT more than I do. Nursing is changing, there is less demand than when she first started but they have a strong union. I definitely enjoy what my job entails a lot more than I would as a nurse though. It's a good profession. I would stick with RT for a while. If you find that medicine is truly your calling then go to PA school.
If your wife is doing real well though, you might put the two of you farther ahead by learning to invest.

To me the answer depends on two questions:

1. If you keep it, will you still have enough cash in reserve to do another deal?

2. How hard is it to find deals?

If this property uses up all your cash and finding more deals is easy then I would sell it to build your cash for more acquisitions. At the purchase price you are looking at, $20k is a big peice of a purchase.

If you still have reserves to move on to the next project then waiting 6-12 month to refinance is no big deal and you should keep it.

No way! That would be the end of any balanced good life. Passive income from buy and hold is going to get me where I want to be.