All Forum Posts by: Kevin Charles

I've owned property in Albany for 20 years(and elsewhere as well, so I have enough experience to judge these things with some statistical power.) I can confidently say that in Albany, the inmates are running the asylum.

Cash out refinance means you are taking out one big loan and you get all your equity in one lump sum. Home equity loan means you are taking on a second mortgage that's only equal to whatever equity you have in the house. This doesn't really apply to you, because you are going to be fully paid off. But if you had a place that was worth $150K, for example, and the loan balance was $100K that means you have $50K in equity and could get a home equity loan for that $50K. For these first two you get them in a lump sum, but the minute you get them you start accumulating interest and owe on them in the first month.

HELOC means the same as a home equity loan, except it's revolving like a credit card and they don't just give you $50K - it's a $50K line of credit. The benefit is that you don't have to start paying on the full amount right away you just pay on what you're using. So, if you use $10K of the $50K then next month you only owe on the $10K. This is the better way to go, imo, but the rate is a little higher. So, if you know exactly where you're using the whole amount and want the lower rate, go with a cash out refi. If you don't know exactly where the money is going and want to be able to use it as you need it get a HELOC and pay the higher rate. Good luck!

Figured I'd chime in with my experience with Spartan.

I've also purchased a property with Spartan and I am experiencing something similar. I closed at the end of March and I still haven't received payments for moved in tenants. They leased it out at the end of July and basically made it clear to me my only option would be Section 8 which would have been fine if I had known that going in but it seemed like they went for it because they weren't able to rent it any other way. The only updates I get are when I pester Scott with emails. Whenever he gives me an estimated date for something, I just tack on a month or two because the dates he gives have never been accurate, or even close to accurate. Even during the closing process, I was always leading in the communication. The person I was communicating with left the company and I was sending emails to a nonexistent email for a week and a half before I had to reach out to Clayton here on BP to find that out.

​Overall, I'd rate the experience so far as inefficient and nerve-wracking. I've gotten no emails on major updates during the process, very hand-wavy timelines of the process which always seem to take longer than what I am told and no tenant for 4 months in what was supposed to be a hot rental market during a good time to find tenants, Spring/Summer. On top of that, even with a tenant in the property, payments aren't coming in. I am pretty disappointed with this whole process and to be honest, there is no way I'd buy another property from Spartan at this point. I don't think there's any excuse for this treatment. I get better service at McDonalds. My wife and I expected a much higher standard when we signed up with Spartan and it seems like they haven't managed the growth of their company properly in the past year.