All Forum Posts by: Kim Thomas

I’m right there with you.
Have a rental north of ATL. 
I’ve owned it 20+ years. 15 of those it’s been a rental and I’ve had maybe three months total of no income from it. 
I own it free and clear. 
Conservative value is $160k and it keeps going up. 
Been looking for a HELOC on it for about a year. Nobody will touch it. Not even for 50%!
But you can bet I’m going to go down the list of names provided above tomorrow! 

Starting on my second flip next week.

Did a not-so-great job of keeping up with receipts and expenses on my first flip and it made things difficult in the end to fully asses. 

I think what Im looking for is an app that allows me to take a photo or screen shot of a receipt and then uses OCR to extract information.

The result would be a list of items on the receipt and the price paid for each.

I would then, presumably later in the day or week, assign a category to each item (ex. paint, drywall, appliances, cabinets, labor) and maybe even a sub category (bedroom 1, bathroom 1, kitchen, etc). 

I’d be able to open the app, click on categories and see where we stand in the budget.

In the end, I could have the app create a spreadsheet to show a summary or a detailed report and be able to save it to my drive and/or email it. 

Would be fantastic if I could also click on an individual item and it would pull up the receipt/screenshot. 

Does such a beast exist? Is there an app for that? Free would be great, but I’m willing to drop some cash on it. 

Thanks for any suggestions or thoughts! 

Total newb, but having lived in NOVA for 8 years, I might be able to offer some insight. 

Keep tabs on the area within Annandale city limits. If NOVA had a lower-end area, this is it. But prior to doing so, check out the school ratings to ensure you’re in a good school zone. 

There’s a small area of Annandale that one would think is in Fairfax . . . it’s just over the Little River Turnpike  bridge, but still has the Annandale  address - off Guinea Rd. 

A house hack in the Truro neighborhood would be pretty easy! 
The neighborhood is in a transition phase where original owners are passing away or moving to retirement homes. The houses are massive when you consider the basements, and the basements are KEY!

If you can get your hands on a house where the original owner has not made updates, and maybe hasn’t even finished out the basement, you can finish it off by easily adding 3 bedrooms, a small kitchen, and living area (all that I saw had a bathroom already). Houses that are already finished might advertise an in-law suite. 

Rents runs around $3200 for the entire home. But if you make it into two residences (one family up and one family down) I think you could get $2100-$2500/family. Families will do big things to get into that school district (Wakefield/Frost/Woodson). 

We considered buying in the neighborhood at one point. We could swing the house and insurance payments, but the taxes were what sent it over for us. 

Hope this helps. 
good luck!