All Forum Posts by: Khoa Ha

 Hi Alison! Thank you so much for your thoughts. Just starting out, I am torn between wanting to learn the ropes by working with a PM company initially versus saving the money and self managing (especially as we are just starting out). How did you obtain all of the documents for being a landlord? Like a lease agreement, deposit agreement, etc. 

Hi everyone,

I am new to the forum but have been listening to Bigger Pockets podcast for sometime now. I am currently at a crossroads for selling or renting a single family home I own in Virginia. 

The house is 5 years old (I bought it new) with brand new pre finished hard wood flooring I put in along with a fresh paint job. It is located in Northern Virginia and I could either rent the house at $2,800.00 per month and cash flow about $900.00 per month after accounting for monthly costs. This is about 4.5% return on equity I have in the home. The house is in a strong and developing community. 

OR I could sell the house and walk away with about 210k in cash and avoid any tax exposure because I lived there 2 out of the last 5 years. My plan would be to earn 5% interest on the money in a CD or Bond while I look for another investment opportunity. 

It is my only rental home and I would like to own more homes in the future but interest rates rising it also makes it difficult to purchase homes. Am I messing up by selling my one and only rental home that returns a decent cash flow rate and has a decent mortgage rate at 4.3%?

Any pointers or guidance is appreciated 

It makes sense to purchase your investment property under an LLC. I just bought a house under my LLC that I launched last year. I went through a lender who knew that I was buying it for investment purposes. Also my accountant advised me to put new acquisitions under separate LLCs so that they are individually covered under limited liability. So depending what you already own under your current LLC, you could acquire the property under the existing one or set up a new one. I'm not a legal expert though so you might want to check with one to be absolutely certain. I'm sure there are many attorneys here on the BP forums.

@Khoa Ha

There are 100,000 posts on this subject. They will ignore the LLC if it's new and underwrite you and have you provide a personal guarantee.

Opened this topic thinking there was only a few pages of dialogue (silly me.)

Instead of reading all 100 pages of content, my guess is a correction is coming. I don't foresee a "crash" myself, but the market prices will end up needing to correct with the state of the economy now, and where it's going.

Which stings when I see realtors up and down my FB timeline, mortgage brokers too, swearing the market is cooling and that "now is a good time to purchase." Everyone's entitled to their objectional views, but I cringe when I see this kind of advice getting tossed around sooo loosely.

We shall see....

“Good time to buy” is relative. I always believe that if it is your primary resident and you can afford the monthly mortgage then you should buy regardless of the which way you think the market will head toward. If you compare the market of 6 months ago to the market of today you will see that the monthly mortgage payment for a $1,000,000 home with 20% down and 3% rate is still lower than the monthly mortgage of an $800,000 home at 6% rate right now ($3,373 vs $3,837). So essentially the buyer lost 20% of their purchasing power because they believe the raise in interest rate will trigger a crash. I swear that last year people were predicting a crash as well as the year before that and so on. So far we can go way back to 2012 and find people that were claiming property were too expensive. What if you see a drop of 10% in home price in a few months but lose 20% of buying power due to interest rate increase. Is it really worth it? It haven’t for people that have been waiting on the sideline for many years.