All Forum Posts by: Ke Nan Wang

I would turn things on. I'm in Florida so maintaining climate control is good for the property. 

blinds all the way. Easy to install, easy to replace, affordable pricing. No wasted brain cells to decide curtain style or colors. 

I have done a few seller finance deals before and hope I can offer you some insight. 

You would negotiate a purchase and sales agreement with your tenant to agree on the major terms of the transaction such as the price, earnest deposit, # of years, downpayment, interest rate, who pays what part of the closing cost, and when to close and transfer the deed. You can easily generate an amortization table based on those terms and this table also needs to be part of the contract. Not sure how good are you with using standardized real estate forms, if not, you might need to ask a realtor friend to help you draft the contract and offer to pay the friend a fee for the time. If the discussion is moving out of a standardized RE form, then probably going with a RE attorney from the get go is the right approach. 

Once you have a contract, you can find a trusty and neutral real estate attorney to draft the seller's financing agreement and carry out the closing process (pay doc stamp fees, taxes, transfer deed etc.). Or, I would strongly recommend that both parties are represented by their own RE professionals (either a real estate agent or an RE attorney) so if any problems arise in the future, nobody can claim they didn't have representation. So all the fees to pay towards these professionals are categorized under "closing costs." 

-Or- you can just go directly to a RE attorney and do the purchase agreement negotiation, signing and closing process in one company (keep in mind dual agent is illegal in some states so the attorney mostly can only be a transactional agent). The 1st method is recommended because it's easier and cheaper to agree on the big terms first and then hash out the details with the attorney. 

With that being said, I'm not sure exactly why you want to do a seller financing deal other than you don't want to pay capital gain and want to live off a steady stream of income for awhile. Or another upside in today's market, make good money on interest rate. Also I would consider some kind of prepayment penalty if the goal is to make money off interest. Later down the road when the interest rate drops and your tenant decides to refinance the house and pay you off early, at least you get compensated for it. 

Also keep in mind depend on the area, foreclosure takes much longer, more expensive to execute if the borrower defaults. So the downpayment needs to be sufficient to cover your expenses and the headache in an event your tenant defaults and you need to take the property back. 

Hope this helps. 
 

Someone gave a great advise before:

If no showing, price way too high;

If showing but no signing lease, price a little high. 

If people are coming to see your place, that means the marketing is on point (presentation + pricing). If nobody is coming to see it, fix marketing. 

If I'm in your shoes, and I'm having showings, I would offer someone some kinda incentive on the spot to secure an application. For me, my first incentive is offering yard maintenance. My listing is always marketed Tenant maintains yard. That's $80-100 a month expense and it's something makes sense in my area. If still no luck to get an application, I would politely ask feedback from them why they aren't interested in renting our property. Some will and some won't. But any feedback is good. 

The PM should be doing this for you and providing feedback to you. If all they are doing is listing it on the market and fire and forget, find another one. 

Hi @Tucker Arlosoroff, the reality in real estate investing is that you need have some kinda way to generate money first. You can generate money by providing some sorta value to other people, your time and labor in exchange for money. If you have a higher useful degree (engineer, computer science, etc.), it's easier to get a higher wage job and it's the lowest risk of generating income. If you are going in the business route, it's doable, many people have done it, it's just lots of hard work and higher risk. Much harder and riskier than getting a degree and entering into a W-2 job and just exchange time for money. That's why many entrepreneurs fail and the ones who make it, make great money.  

I disagree with some of the sentiment that some of the successful people have it here that, oh it's easy, you just do XYZ and boom, you make $XXX. They often overlooked the years of experience, knowledge, intuition and relationship they developed while they were crawling through the trenches and they think simply by telling other people what they know, and others can skip the steps. 

If you are going into the business route, the best way is to find the most successful people in the industry and figure out a way to work for them. Offer whatever you can offer to them and work for them and learn. Books and podcast can only bring you so much value, the rest is experience and network. 

Hope this helps and best of luck to your REI journey.

Welcome to BP and the world of real estate investing. 

One advise I can give you for now is that be aware of all the "gurus" out there who want to get into your pocket before you even started your journey. You can get 90% of the advise for free and books are the most affordable way to learn. If someone takes you to a symposium/meetup and afterwards want to enroll you into a $5000 course to "show you the secret of getting rich quick", best way for you is to walk away. Not saying those things don't have their merits, some do and some don't. But at this point you don't have the knowledge, experience or intuition to make a good call on the values those gurus will bring to you.  

Best wishes to your REI journey.

We have been using Apartment.com for years now and yes, that's normal for bank ACH. 

If you want expedite it, you would need to ask your tenants to pay using either a credit/debit card and a 3% fee. You will probably receive the funds the next day. If neither you nor the tenants want to pay that fee, I would recommend either casher's check or wiring funds. 

Out of all the third party management software I have tried and used in the past, I like TurboTenant the best. I've used them to screen tenants and now they also offer rent collection tools on their platform. If you use their paid program, you can also receive the ACH funds faster. 

I'm also using Guesty for Host right now and it do have issues with both VRBO and Booking.com. Airbnb is pretty good so far and 90% of my bookings come from Airbnb.  Feel like I'm using Guesty just to manage Airbnb. I think the best alternative out there is Hostaway but will need inputs from other members in this forum and see how is Hostaway working out. 

I think the reason I'm using Guesty is because it can be integrated with pricelab. 

My issue with VRBO is that ever since I switched to Guesty, I have zero bookings from VRBO. Before the switch, I had about 10% of my bookings from VRBO. Not sure what's wrong. 

My biggest problem is with Booking.com. It's not very clear how the price is calculated. Even I have cleaning fee setup in Guesty, when I sync Guesty with Booking.com, Guesty zero out my cleaning fee. I only found out when one booking came in for one night that's lower than my cleaning fee. WTF! Gotta eat that mistake. Also when I synced Guesty with booking.com, all the old bookings were only marked as BLOCKED on the Guesty Calendar. So if a guest cancels the booking, you have to manually reopen the calendar. This doesn't happen to bookings made after the Guesty integration. It cost us 4 nights of booking. Also Booking.com somehow doesn't accept credit card anymore after the integration and right now I just found out a guest is checking in on Wednesday and he's paying cash. 

I have heard Guesty for Pro is much better but also more expensive. I'm considering as we continue to expand our STR portfolio and try out Guesty for Pro and see if it's better.

@Huong T Nguyen Each house is 1219 sq ft conditioned and 1425 sq ft total. The price per sq ft won't be accurate any more in today's market since COVID drove the price up by around 40%. But those houses were built about average $140k each construction cost, so about $115 per sq ft. I'm never a big fan of the price per sq ft because every build is different, and do you factor conditioned vs unconditioned space?  

I'm looking at these houses we built two years ago. We are still building today with much better houses because we continue to improve on our efficiency. 

This is a vacation house we just finished in February: https://www.aryeo.com/v2/YEZQA...
Another model: https://www.aryeo.com/v2/DMRXA...

Vacation rental is a different business, a lot more work but also a lot more upsides. 

Just another factor to consider if retirement is your plan. 

Imagine what cashflow you could have if you have all the houses paid off. 

There are generally two strategies I have seen people do.

1. Just ride it out the usual 30 year mortgage based on a positive cashflow model. The properties pay for themselves and 30 years later you are done. This require you to start investing early in your life. 

2. Be extremely frugal for about 10-15 years. Continue working your W-2 jobs, contribute all cashflow from the properties and your surplus income into paying off the mortgage. This requires high discipline and you can get to the end goal much faster. 

The above two strategies were for retirement plans. I have a friend who's dad did the plan 2 on a premium 500-unit storage site, didn't take a paycheck from it for 15 years and now he live off roughly $70000 a month income from the building with almost no headache and very little Capex.

Obviously if the goal is to build generational wealth and grow a portfolio, the strategy would be more aggressive.