All Forum Posts by: Kyle Eckert

Get with a local.  Someone who is interested in real estate and can point you in the right direction and knows how to evaluate neighborhoods for what you are looking for.

It would be useful if you elaborated on B and C class neighborhoods in STL.  By the classical definition thrown around on here a lot, most of the city is old and run-down, putting it in the C-D range.  Throwing out neighborhoods, sections of town, or zip codes would make it much less ambiguous.

Welcome. What I did for our LLC:

1. Think of a name (The hardest part!)

2. Go to https://www.sos.mo.gov/business/startBusiness and read everything relevant, and then fill out the form to create it.  It's pretty straight forward.  Google anything you dont understand.

3. Pay $50 to create it.  Pretty simple.

The hard part is creating the rules for the partnership, which is where the lawyer comes in handy. This is the one part we havent done officially yet, but we will need to after we get our first property. Dont let the LLC slow you down, you dont technically need it to get started and can easily come after.

(I'm not a lawyer, this is just my experience)

What part of town are you looking at?

I am looking for recommendations for a bank to open our checking and savings for our rental business.  I would prefer local to St. Louis but I am not opposed to a national chain with good tools to use.  Has anyone had a good experience?

Direct that question to the department who issues the permit.  Ask anonymously and keep bugging people until someone who knows says yes or no.  You can usually get someone who knows if you ask a specific enough question and pester for an answer.

 I usually play polite and dumb on these calls and it gets you pretty far.

A few things:

-The inspector plays a huge role with the outcome of the inspection.  See if you can request someone specific.  If you can, find someone who seems reasonable and request them.

-North County is trying to improve its severally tarnished image, which would explain the inspectors getting pressure to nit-pick appearance items.

-I have heard many of the southern STL counties (Not Jefferson) are nearly unreasonable in their requests and policies for renting and safety.

-That may just be the cost of doing business in that area.

Aaron,

Thanks for the info.  Where do you find the list of cancellations?  I noticed a lot of skipped properties last round and I was wondering if there was an updated list.

As for approaching the properties, I would hesitate to actually bother anyone for two reasons:

1. I think there is verbage somewhere that it is illegal to bother the current resident or trespass for this purpose.  I cant remember where I read that though.

2. There are a lot of guns in St. Louis, and actually knocking on the door puts me at risk.  That risk is not worth the reward.  I was thinking more along the lines of a direct mail type thing.

@Gregory J. Thanks for the input.  I agree on all the points you made above.  I think one of the ways we gain knowledge is asking questions, and that is what prompted mine.

I watched as specific investors at the last auction systematically bid to a certain number on certain properties.  These people have been doing this for years, had a system and a certain part of town they wanted to own in, even a style of bidding which was their own.  It was effective, and certain people walked away owning 10s of properties they had info on.  One lady happily purchased an entire city block for whatever they were asking, which was fun to watch.

By posting this question, I was hoping to find someone savvy in this realm, but so far its just us dabblers.

The list for the auction came out yesterday, having 382 properties listed for auction.  67/382 are repeats from previous auctions.  These could probably be purchased for the minimum bid but were possibly passed on for good reason.

-I plotted the properties using an online map maker, giving a visual of where the properties are.  It should be noted that using St. Louis instead of Saint Louis gave a much better map.  I will post the map after the auction occurs.

-95% of the properties are in North St. Louis, which is not surprising to me.  There are probably some gems in there in stable parts of town, but I am not familiar enough with the area to make that assessment so I rule them out.

-Last month only had 2 properties which I found remotely interesting.  One was in my neighborhood.  Disappointingly, I believe it was settled before the auction and was skipped over.  This reassured my assessment of that property though, since me and 3 guys in high priced suits left immediately after.

-I google mapped each property and used street view to find the house and check that it wasn't falling down, some were.  Of the roughly 30 properties in my part of town, I narrowed down 14 to pursue further.  Again, 1 in my neighborhood.

-I called a few title search companies and found the process to be expensive for someone else to do. The city of STL currently doesn't have a database for lien research, that I could find at least. http://www.stlouiscityrecorder.org/land/stlarealie... was useful for listing the types of liens that could exist.

-I will attempt to send a letter to the owners of the properties of interest to offer assistance in getting their property out from auction.  We will see how that does, doesn't cost much to do.

-Again, if anyone else wants to share their experience with this process feel free.