All Forum Posts by: Skyler Smith

@Johnny Hunt glad it helped! Best of luck with your deal.

Hey Casey! Roy and the surrounding areas are very exciting these days, that whole area has seen some awesome appreciation over the last few years. Deals are getting snatched up all over but you can still find them out that way.

One strategy my clients have used before to get around the rental restriction is to sell the property with seller financing - you can often command higher than market rent, and seller financing buyers are typically willing to pay a bit more than market value as well on the purchase price, so you can get a better return in a 3-4 year window than you might have gotten just by renting the property to a tenant. 

The rental restriction is frustrating and very common in Utah, but it's often necessary for condo communities and such - if there are too many rental units in a community banks often will not offer mortgage financing and it makes the price of the individual units plummet, since the only way to sell is for cash.

Hey @Johnny Hunt I've got a flip coming up in Logan in the next month or so and I regularly need to paint my rental properties up in Logan as well. Do you have interest in driving up here for jobs?

@Jonathan Escobar I'll go through my recent emails of the wholesalers who have me on their list and double check if they're on here. I think you'll do great from the sound of things!

Hey Jonathan! Sounds like you're off to a great start. All of the wholesalers I've worked with in Utah focus primarily on single family homes, but I have seen a duplex or two come through their pipeline. I think your idea of starting out with a 4plex house hack is huge, that's how I got started and it kickstarted my investing. Are you also working with a real estate agent who does off-market deals?

@William Hochstedler thanks for the heads up

@Stefan Coles the NUREIA is meeting tonight in Ogden. We do the first Tuesday of the month in Ogden and the third Wednesday of the month in Logan

Nureia.org

Hey Ana, welcome!

If you've got three good leads on properties already, don't let anyone tell you you're not able to do it! I do think that wholesaling is difficult to manage at a large scale here, it's hard to keep a consistent pipeline of great deals. That's not to say the deals aren't out there!

I'd find some investors and start running the numbers by them. If you can get a good enough purchase price, you'll be able to buy or wholesale these properties with no problem.

@Kristi Harmon

There's no requirement to work with a real estate agent when you're buying or selling in Utah, but I have some thoughts as I read through your comments:

1. Many RE brokerages in Utah carry "errors and omissions" insurance, and if there is a lawsuit you will want to make sure to have that kind of protection regarding mistakes in the contract. An attorney will accomplish the same goal in this regard. It's also not unheard of for some agents to charge a flat fee just to write up the paperwork for both buyer and seller and keep out of the rest of the negotiations. That said, plenty of great investors never use an agent, but from the looks of things you'll probably make a lot of simple mistakes early on if you don't have a professional holding your hand through the process. That brings me to my next thought.

2. I get your frustration at not feeling like you're the #1 priority of your agent, but think of how this looks if you made two offers with him today but you're going to leave him out of this deal *on the same day.* I'm not saying that this is the agent for you, but if you want to thrive in the real estate game long term it would be hugely beneficial to get an agent on your "board of advisors," and one that will have your best interest in mind. You're not going to be getting the awesome off-market deals in your first few interactions with an agent, and this should be a relationship that lasts years. Factor that relationship equity in to your financial statement on this house and decide how you want to run your real estate business. This could be your chance to win the confidence of your agent and have him work for you for years to come.

3. You will likely have stronger negotiating power than the seller if you're being represented by an agent. I've represented plenty of buyers and helped them buy homes "for sale by owner," where the seller wasn't represented by an agent and I can pretty much steamroll them in negotiations. I will commonly make a request for the buyer that the seller just agrees to, where if they had an agent there would definitely be push back. A good agent - the right agent for you - will pay him/herself off just in contract negotiations, wether that's before or after you settle on a contract price.