All Forum Posts by: Kathy Fettke

Great! You can signup for the tour here: https://www.gatewayinvestors.com/tour/

Hey everyone! If you're attending BPCON, I wanted to let you know that the day after the conference, on October 9th, I will be joining my daughter, Krista, and her company, Gateway Investors, for a property tour in Tulum. This is a fantastic opportunity to explore some prime investment properties in an extremely fast-growing region!

If you're interested in joining the tour and learning more about potential investment opportunities in Tulum, feel free to reach out. We'd love to have you come along!

Define real estate. Headlines often speak about the current real estate crash, and when you read further, you realize they are talking about "office." The office market is definitely crashing - mostly in urban cores. However, affordable housing is in very short supply - realtor.com says as many as 7 million homes are needed. If you can provide affordable housing- and by that I mean that a family with the average income of the area can afford your rent - you will always have a renter. If you can buy real estate in areas where there is population growth, job growth and infrastructure growth, you're making a good bet that there will be demand for housing well into the future. However, be careful of markets where people are leaving and population is declining. 

@Kiki Helland Oh no! Did you let anyone know at RWN? I hadn't heard about this but I personally got my @$$ handed to me in Detroit. We had dozens of properties in our SFR fund and it was very difficult to manage and even sell. Were you able to sell yours?

@Kiki Helland@Julian Espino @Damon Riley

I am not surprised at this news of Autumn property management filing Ch 7 bankruptcy. It was clear to us they had major problems within the first few months of their acquisition of Proway Property Management. 

Did you not receive communication about these issues from RWN? As soon as we received complaints from investors, we let other investors know. Dozens of RealWealth members transitioned over to RPM Detroit and the feedback we received was night and day.

We had to be careful about how we approached the situation, as Autumn Property management  hired an attorney and threatened to sue us for introducing our members to an alternative property management company. Geez...

As you know, Strategy Properties was a former referral partner of RealWealth in Detroit. They were fine initially, until they started to grow too quickly. We discontinued our relationship with them nearly 3 years ago once we started hearing complaints from members. 

Remember, we don't own these companies that we refer investors to. Just because everything passes vetting initially doesn't mean things can't change. We are constantly refining our network based on what our thousands of members experience and tell us. 

Please reach out to your RealWealth investment counselor if you are ever in a tough situation with one of our teams. We will try to help when we can. And if you receive a "snarky" response from one of our team members at RWN, I want to know immediately! 

We care about your success and your experience, while also recognizing we only have so much control over companies we don't own. It's more of a Yelp type situation where our referral partners are there due to great reviews - but that can change, and when it does, the referral partners is removed from our list. 

I hope this helps explain the situation. Let me know if you want that referral to RPM

@Kevin Yu @Lisa T.

I would certainly like to know what your experience has been! Please message me with details so that we can be pro-active in making any needed changes. I did notice that this was posted a year ago. We have had some very positive personnel changes since then within RealWealth. Outside of RealWealth, we have no control. Property providers and property managers can be great when we initially vet them, but things can change over time. The only way we find out is when our investors tell us. If there are complaints, we remove those teams and resources from our referral list - that's really the only power we have over companies we don't own. Perhaps we should send out more regular surveys to get the feedback we need! Thank you for being a part of our network that helps protect investors through your input.

Hi Brandi, I thought I'd chime in here since I was mentioned by name by others in this thread.Congratulations on taking bold action towards acquiring your first investment property out of state!

First, I want to applaud the efforts you have gone to conduct good due diligence on the company we referred you to, the area, and the property itself. This will serve you well in your investing journey. We encourage RealWealth investors to be curious, methodical, and to remain in the driver's seat of their acquisition process just like you are demonstrating.

We are proud to refer our members to CR of Maryland. We put them through a lengthy vetting process in 2019 and they have since sold and manage over 150 fully rehabbed properties for RealWealth investors. We continue to monitor the experiences and feedback of these investors and overall, our investors are pleased and earning good returns.
I can confidently say that their renovation quality is some of the best I've seen in the turnkey space. They tear the homes they acquire to the studs and rebuild them to like-new condition. On average, they are spending $70-90k on renovations on each home. Ordering an appraisal will allow you and your lender to know that you are not paying above market value for the property. If your appraisal for some reason comes in low, take it immediately to CR of Maryland. They will either dispute the appraisal or have to lower their price. Your RealWealth investment counselor can coach you more on how to go about this.

Investing in transitioning neighborhoods is not for everyone and it can come with some challenges. Partnering with a knowledgeable broker and property manager is critical to your long term success in these areas. CR of Maryland has demonstrated to us time and time again that they are committed to the long term success of our investors, even through the inevitable challenges.

While anyone can post on a public forum, not anyone can be a RealWealth property team. I stand behind the great lengths we go to to vet the markets and property team we work with. We currently work with 18 different companies who all earn our continued endorsement.

In general, the RealWealth vetting process includes these steps:
- Background checks 
- Testimonials from current investors
- Lengthy questionnaires are completed by the property team and then interrogated by experienced investors
- Onsite visits by experienced RealWealth staff to see neighborhoods, rehab quality, meet the PM  etc.

Once they have passed all these phases, we launch them to our most experienced investors first. Only after we have received good feedback from numerous investors, do we launch them to the entire network.

These proven processes have served us well for the 20 years we have been in business. I do know a thing or two about out of state investing! People like you and me, living in high cost markets, don't have the luxury of investing where we live. We rely on local, expert teams like CR of Maryland and all of the other RealWealth property teams. We are committed to helping as many out of state investors navigate this process as we can!

Come learn about the newest trend in vacation home ownership! Why be the sole owner a vacation home that you don't use more than 6 weeks a year? You still have to pay for taxes, insurance, and HOA for the entire year, whether you are using it or not. Plus, empty houses are not good for the community during a housing shortage. What if you could own 1/8th of an LLC, have 6 weeks use of your luxury property, and share all the expenses? And if you're not using your 6 weeks, you can put it on the rental market. You could be the owner of a $3 million property for only $400,000. And your share can be financed, if the group agrees to get financing for the LLC. If you build the house or BRRRR, you can own you share for almost nothing. Kathy Fettke will be sharing how she has partnered with Ember Homes for shared rentals in Park City, in Discovery Ridge - a new subdivision bordering Woodward Action Sports Center. (Woodward is now an official Olympic training site. You can see the halfpipe from your living room!) See you there!

We know that Federal Reserve is hell-bent on fighting inflation, and they do this through a process they call "demand destruction." In humanoid terms, this means they want to kill enough jobs that people will stop spending, which would increase supply. With fewer able buyers/renters, prices/rents come down. (A different approach might be to create more supply. Alas... I digress.) So here we are with the Fed continuing to raise rates to destroy "demand" (yes to create job losses) and if they stay the course, we could see rents decrease as fewer people are able to afford the rent, which would increase supply. With that said, we have record household formation, so either these young families are going to live with family, friends or on the streets, or they will pony up and spend the bulk of their money on housing. Right now, as we speak, there are still more jobs than people who want them, and unemployment is very low, so this dream of the Fed's to kill jobs is not manifesting as quickly as they hoped. We should all just stop spending for a month and that could help! Some good news: year over year inflation numbers will improve since inflation really picked up last fall. This might help the Fed adjust its current trajectory. 

@Brett D. Hi Brett, I'm sorry to hear that you had difficulty originally getting a good tenant. What is the status now? 

On the value side of things, it appears your property increased in value from the $165k purchase price to about $200k now. Does that sound correct? If you put 20% down, then you have doubled your money in a year! Not bad.

Please keep us posted on how things go as we do care about your long term success.