All Forum Posts by: Kris Wong

Avondale is a low-income area. Parts of it are certainly class D. The further you get from Xavier, typically the worse it gets. You should expect to have more work on the management side in an area like this.

They do. 

I have used both Cincinnati Federal and GE Credit Union. Both have been good to work with and have flexible terms. Cincinnati Federal is probably a little bit easier to work with and the people there are very helpful. Their rates might be slightly higher though.

Are you buying for a primary residence or as an investment? Buying a SFH out of the MLS in the Austin MSA is almost guaranteed to cash flow negative. Maybe if you find a real fixer-upper that none of the non-investment buyers want to touch you could find something that makes sense, but then you'll probably be competing with the flippers. What's your goal here?

First question I would ask yourself (or your mother) is, what are your goals? Is it to supplement monthly income (cash flow), is it wealth accumulation, or a little of both? Austin is a market that is significantly skewed toward wealth accumulation. Second question is, do you want to be a landlord? With that type of cash you could easily invest passively in 2 - 3 deals with an experienced deal sponsor. As pointed out by @Tina Tsysh, 4-unit properties and under are residential, so your mother's DTI and such will need to checkout to get a mortgage. With $280K you would be looking at roughly 3 duplexes or 2 quads as far as Austin MSA goes. YMMV.

I see that this thread is old, but I can add some perspective here, and it's still relevant today. I have been working with Bridge for over 3 years, and Voepel for 2+ years (after transitioning from HRG, which was a mess). The tl;dr version is that both companies have a solid reputation, are professional, responsive, and good to work with. I would recommend them. Of course, neither are perfect - read on for further details.

I started working with Bridge because the returns met the criteria I was looking for, and the team seemed solid and willing to stand behind their products. This has proven to be true. The homes I have purchased have had some issues. These include a number of minor maintenance items that you would normally expect, but also larger CapEx issues. Just because you are buying a "turn-key" product doesn't mean that the house is entirely brand new. You need to budget accordingly.

At one of my homes, we had water main issues. You probably all know that these repairs can get very expensive, and it did. I didn't bother discussing this with the Bridge team because this is not in their scope of work. Voepel took care of these repairs, which were extensive.

At another home, both the deck and most of the roof needed to be replaced after 2 years of ownership. The Bridge warranty is 1 year, but I still brought this to their attention, because I should not have had these types of issues after 2 years of ownership. The Bridge team acknowledged the issues and stepped up to the plate to get this taken care of at no expense to me, and in a reasonable time frame as well. In my experience, these guys do the right thing.

As for Voepel - we all know property management is not an easy job. I work with 4 different property managers in different locations, and none of them are perfect. Voepel is building what seems to be a solid team, and they are always responsive when I reach out - even to Brent directly. They are slow on their unit turns. I believe they are working to address this, but it's an issue at this time. Their maintenance can also be on the expensive side. When I have pushed back on larger bids in the past, though, they have put in the effort to get a more reasonable price. I believe they have undergone some rapid growth, but continue to hire and polish their systems to accommodate this. I am also satisfied with their leasing and renewals so far.

I can't speak to the legal risk as mentioned by @Travis Moe, but frankly, I find that others are blowing other risks out of proportion. Your PM is already handling all your revenue. Your PM is already perfectly capable of committing fraud w/o having signing authority on your account. Your PM also will hold all your deposits, whether that's in their own account or yours (w/ signing authority). It might not be the setup that I would choose given the option, but I also don't view it as an immediate red flag. I work with one PM that operates this way, and two that don't. Especially as you move into bigger properties, this type of thing becomes more necessary. I wonder how many PMs operate 100+ unit apartment complexes w/o using a setup similar to this?

I can recommend both GFH (https://www.gfh-law.com/) and Prominent Title (https://www.prominenttitleagen...). We have had a good experience with both on our apartment deals.

This meetup was a pretty good one, and they are meeting every week, though I haven't attended since February:

https://www.meetup.com/AustinC...

I am always a bit skeptical when I see that one partner will be occupying the property, whether the other partner will actually be receiving enough benefit to make it worth their while, but I digress as that's not the question you asked. You really only need to understand 2 things here: 1. you can't take title to the property in your LLC if you want conventional financing, and 2. you'll be very hard-pressed to find a commercial lender to lend on that deal. This kind of question gets asked just about every day on BP, so you can read all about it by searching. The short answer is - get conventional/FHA financing and close in your personal names. After a few weeks or so, you can transfer title to your LLC. Just keep in mind that business entities and residential real estate don't play super well together.