All Forum Posts by: Kevin Suksi

Thanks Josh for the reply. I would note also that we have the business listed as residential construction for tax purposes rather than real estate construction. We do flips, but we thought banks would be more receptive to construction than to real estate.

We'll try Staples too. Thanks for the suggestion.

PS I know this topic has been posted before, but market conditions do change and there hasn't been a discussion in the past 6 months or so.

We have an LLC which is about 9 months old and are trying to establish business credit. I have gathered from other postings that you want to try to get 5 trade lines established and that the business must be at least 2 years old in order to get a line of credit from a bank.

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions.

So far we have:

1 - established a line at Home Depot for the business for $10,000
2 - applied for an AMEX in the business name, denied due to short duration being in business
3 - applied for discover in the business's name which is currently pending

I have an 800 personal FICO.

I've also gathered that we should put the utilities in the business's name on the next flip. We do have a DUNS number established for the business; I believe this happened when we got the home depot account.

Does anyone have any advice as to where some good places to get trade lines might be? I'd like to minimize how many applications I submit because too many inquiries can damage your profile.

Thanks in advance for any replies. I value the insight provided in this forum very much.

In any case, I believe the conventional appraisal will take place later this week or early next - I'll let you guys know how this plays out if anyone is interested.

@ Don - yes I agree there is a problem with the appraisal process. We've had 3 actual offers in excess of the appraised amount and we've turned away a couple of additional similar offers just because we're trying to process the ones we already have.

Isn't "market value" what something will sell for on the open market? If appraisals continue to hold down the upside of prices the way they, this housing market will NEVER recover. . .

Josh thanks for the quick reply. I think we may have over-improved the property. There is nothing in the city we are selling in which is updated to the extent of our property, so we're getting offers that can't appraise due to the comps.

We have a flip that we are doing here in Metro Detroit. We listed the house for $125,000 and have had multiple offers within the first week. We accepted an offer at full price with 5K in concessions, netting 120 (FHA offer). Then another offer came in, a conventional mortgage offer at $125K with no concessions and $30,000 down. Our realtor tells us there is a third potential full price offer waiting in the wings.

The appraisal came back at $111,000, so the first buyer revised their offer to this amount less $2,000 in concessions, netting $109,000. Obviously we would like to go with the backup offer at this point.

My questions are:

1 - Does anyone know how conventional appraisals are coming in these days versus FHA appraisals?
2 - If the appraisal comes back at $111,000 again for the conventional as it did for the FHA, can I still sell it for more than that?

My thought was that if we went to $120K, and this buyer has 31K down, they'll mortgage 89K, which happens to be exactly 80% of the 111K appraisal amount.

Thanks in advance for any opinions on this transaction.

Thanks Paul! I can see that there is endless information here and there are many people here who seem to be very interested in helping others with their challenges.

Hello all, my name is Kevin Suksi. My wife Cara and I are new real estate investors who focus on Detroit suburbs in Wayne County, MI.

We have 2 rental properties and are in the process of executing our 2nd REO flip, which went on the market last week and is already under contract and pending inspection.

Our company is called Michigan Starter Homes; our business plan focuses on providing move-in ready homes for first time home buyers.

We did our first flip with cash from our savings and did most of the work ourselves. For our second which is in process now, we funded half the deal and brought in a deal partner for the other half. We still did a lot of the work, but less than half of it.

Some of our goals for 2010 include:

1 - Execute 5 flips this year
2 - Network with similar real estate investors
3 - Bring on 1-2 more deal partners
4 - Meet more contractors and develop a complete team of go-to players and reduce / eliminate us doing the rehabs
5 - Learn the short sale game as the good REOs seem to be drying up.
6 - Improve our web presence

Thanks for reading and I look forward to meeting like-minded investors.

We had some white KILZ left over on one of ours and used it as ceiling paint - looks the same as the actual ceiling paints out there.