All Forum Posts by: Ke Nan Wang

Hi @Michael Collins,

Building a team is always a challenge. If you are doing it on your own it would be even more difficult. 

Besides asking for referrals here, the best way I found helpful was to join a local real estate investor FB group or attend Meetups and network with liked minded people. Most of these people from you local area should have great recommendations on attorneys and CPAs. Most of my rockstars were found this way. When I joined my local FB group, I found abundant referrals for good trade. Still don’t skip the interview process but your funnel of quality leads should increase. 

Hope this helps with your search. 

The cost will depend on how long the wire needs to be. If your panel is inside the garage, you can add a 240V outlet underneath the panel if there's room and at a minimum it should cost $350 and I had people quoted me for $500. If you need to pull some long wires, expect it to be $1200 to $1500. Simply ask your tenant is that the price he's willing to pay. If not, what's his budget and are you willing to split it with the tenant. 

If tenant agrees to pay that, I would get three quotes from a master electrician along with necessary drywall patch and paint job. Have the tenant signs an agreement that the tenant will pay for the cost, maybe 50% upfront and 50% when the job is done. 

In FL real estate law, don't quote me working off memory here: if the improvement is permanently attached to the property, it's an essential part of the property's functionality it's costly to remove or causing property damage to remove, that improvement is considered a fixture to the property and no longer belongs to the tenant even the tenant pays for it. And the tenant cannot take it with them when they leave. Maybe check your state law on fixture vs personal property and see if you have to write "who owns the improvement" into the lease.  

St. Augustine is a great vacation rental area. You can cashflow very well at that price range if you manage them yourself (2 x long term rent). You only need to hire a good and reliable cleaner and that will take care of 90% of the hard manual labor of running a STR business.

Long term rental here we are looking at somewhere around 5.5 to 6% CoC ROI right now after management, assuming you are buying a turnkey hassle free new or near new construction property all cash.

If you purchase a lot and build a rental house on it you can hit about 7% CoC ROI.

Feel free to DM me if you need me to do a deep dive in this market. I own and operate LTR STR Real Estate and Construction company here and have all the real world data you need.

There are a few ways to valuate land. 

First determine zoning and find out exactly what you can and cannot do about this piece of land. Your local planning and zoning department is your friend. Go to their office, introduce yourself and become friends with them. Show your charm. Ever watched Better Call Saul and saw how Jimmy deal with the lady at the court, that's the level you need to be with the staff at the planning and zoning department if you are serious about this. A bit kidding but that should be your mindset. 

In my city, multifamily zoning is very rare find so if a residential land is zoned Residential General (RG) where you can build multifamily houses on, that's extremely more valuable than a residential lot only Single Family Residential House (SFR) is allowed.

Usually you want to find out the utility availability to the property. But in your case, since there is existing house, I assume they are available. In our area, city water and sewer are more valuable than well and septic. 

Once you have gathered the above info, now you can go check out comparable. 

Basically just search any land in the neighborhood that's being sold recently and calculate the price per square footage on the land. You will find that they are very similar. There are certain thresholds that will take your land to the next level. Again, since this lot already has a house on it, so don't need to go into this in detail here. 

Also in our county there is a thing called Impact Fee. It's in the realm of tens of thousands dollars if developing a new lot. If there have been existing improvement on the land, whoever is building a subsequent house doesn't need to pay impact fee. And that's value to a developer/builder/owner depend on whoever is setup to pay that impact fee. Not every municipality called it the same term but there will always some kinda fee to pay to the county/city if developing an unimproved land the first time. 

Land sales are in pretty wide swings. I have seen owners listed land for double its value and sitting on the market over years and eventually took a offer that's 50% to 60% of the listed price. There are number of land owners don't need to sell land fast so they are willing to list an unrealistic number and hope one day the market will catch up to it. 

Think this will get you going. Basically just check on recent sales in the neighborhood should get you started. 

You can talk to builders but I wouldn't take much input from them seriously unless they are very reputable and are building exactly the house you want them to build. I have had builders who gave a land purchaser a "shoot from the hip" price when they were asking about the land, once they got it under contract and the builder came back with double the price to build the house. And that house was never built. 99% of the builders in our area are crap. Everyone I've talked to who hired a builder to build their house, none of them recommended their builder. Everyone is like "I would never work with them again." I'm a builder myself and I don't blame them. It's a high risk business and if you play the game of "racing to the bottom," to survive in the business, you either cut corners and build crappy houses or you just stop showing up. The correct way to quote a house is have a construction plan in hand and understand exactly what your customer is building, do the takeoff and get bid from reputable subs. Then do a proper markup on the job. Whoever shoot from the hip and do a price per sq ft price won't be very reliable. 

There are service providers in the market to do direct mailing much much more efficient and better than you do it personally. I have a direct mailer company who can help you design and mail post cards for $0.51 a card. They can pull home owner's name and addresses much more quickly than you can. And their cost of doing one post card is much much lower than you so they can make a profit from providing you the service. Their starting number for postcards is 500. So that would be $255. 

Your most expensive cost besides your own sweat equity is stamps. According to USPS, a postcard stamp is at $0.48. That would be the most inefficient way to do it. Then factor in your letter, paper, ink, printer cost, they add up quickly for the scale you want to do. And right now we aren't even talking about your sweat equity yet. 

@James Hamling has mentioned some great pointers about direct mailing strategy. Personally as a homeowner, I receive over 10's of direct mailer a day. Anything that doesn't provide any value are going directly into the trash can. Something that would grab my interest, even I'm a real estate agent, is the agent who prepped a CMA for my house and list the houses sold in my neighborhood recently. Even I know those houses, I still look at them. I figure many other homeowners would probably do the same. I think if you want to put in the sweat equity to do direct mailing, focus most of your energy in researching a specific property owner and specifically target a narrow property owners with specific marketing material probably better than spending money on large number of postcards.

But if you still decide to do direct mailing at a large scale, please research the companies who specialize in doing this for your target area. They can do it much much more efficient than you can. 

I think the going rate in our market is $3 per linear foot that's baseboard, caulk and paint. If for shoe moulding that would be $.75 extra if doing it before the caulk and paint. 

Sometimes if you feel it's hard to quote by linear foot or area foot, just ask or estimate how long will take to do the job. In our market, a fully licensed skilled handyman who owns his own business charges around $65 an hour, someone with worker's comp charges $75 an hour. A skilled carpenter who can do custom woodwork charges $90-100 an hour. If I'm hiring a skilled labor who has no business overhead I'm willing to pay $40-50 an hour depend on their credibility and skill level. 

If I have to negotiate labor cost with someone whom I have never worked before and that person couldn't give me a labor price up front, I would say: "To me, this seems to be a X day job (feel free to use half day), (in your mind, calculate the hour x hourly rate = Y dollar amount, make sure it's man-hour or man-day so if it's a two-person job then you need to multiply by two for the same time period) does $Y work for you?" Then they can accept or counter. If they counter, I would need to figure out why and see if the counter is reasonable to work with. For most skilled labor, half day of work is the minimum starting hour. For major work, I would use number of days.  

Hope this helps with your job estimate. 

Luxury Vinyl Plank and light oak color all day every day. 

I've used a darker wood flooring color back in a 2019 reno job and now it looks super outdated. 

The lighter tone color seems to be more timeless in my opinion. 

I'm a bit skeptical but would still give him the benefit of the doubt. Mainly because what I have been hearing from most people I've talked to who are in his program, the feedbacks are "Great things, great value, learning so much, great group of people... But I haven't done any deals yet..."

It would be a nice stats for him to track and publish on: How many people paid for his program vs. how many people actually used his method and earned back the tuition in X years (whatever X is reasonably expected). 

Sorry this is happening to you. Real estate is full of landmines and I definitely had my fair share of mistakes so it's important to negotiate a good contract upfront. Or ask for experience person to guide you through the process the first time. 

To screen a professional whom I have never worked with before, I would ask to see their portfolio and past client references. Any reputable and experienced people would be proudly to supply that. If someone who's new to the industry and can't provide any, we wouldn't disregard them right away because I understand everybody has to start somewhere. For starter professional, I would still ask for work they have recently done that they feel proud of, and negotiate a contract in my favorable terms and price. You would find someone sometimes they just starting and they want to charge like a seasoned professional, those aren't the people for you and you need to have the discipline to walk away. 

In the contract, typically architect charge by milestones. Price is set based on either an hourly, or a price per sq ft rate. These are all negotiable. Deposit, existing (for renovation) site plan and preliminary floor plan proposals, then elevation and remainder of the print. Interior design and landscape/hardscape would be cherry on top. 

Also be aware there are difference between someone who's only give you a floor plan and some interior rendering vs. an engineered stamped building blueprint set that you can use to pull permit with. I have talked to clients who had no ideas what the differences are. And some people who aren't actually licensed architect and claimed they can do the plan where in reality they just give you a floor plan and interior rendering and it's useless for permitting nor the contractor. 

I think I understand the experience. From a contractor's standpoint, contractors are in the business to make money. There are two types of good/successful contractor business model IMO, one that do super quality work and have great customer service but they charge a premium for what they do; then second one, maybe it's the one that you encountered, one who's very efficient at achieving an end result (I'm gonna deliver a quality mounted TV for you but don't ask questions) for a customer and charging a very affordable price but expecting to get-in and get-out fast with no hassles, that's how they can offer the affordable price in the first place. Contractors I know who do not fall under these two categories, in general, tend to not run a profitable business and either not getting business at all or get too much business with not enough money and get burnout. 

So if you are hiring and pay for the second type of contractor and expecting the service of the first type of contractor, then maybe you are up for some disappointment.  

That was my experience when I started out and now I've adjusted my expectations and my way to handle contractors and we are having great relationship with everyone. I have no problem with finding the right contractor for the right price and achieve a reasonable result.