All Forum Posts by: Mac Boeve

Hey Nathan,

Thanks would be great! I've been interested in joining a REIA in the area for awhile now.

 Hey Melissa,

Airbnb and the like is intriguing to me and something I'd like to get into in the future. Holland seems like a really great area for short-term vacation rentals, particularly around Tulip Time. How did this year fair for you with TT getting canceled?

Hey All,

The wife and I are new to BP and would like to introduce ourselves. We live in Holland MI, looking to stay in the area and invest locally. We're newer to REI and looking/saving for our first House Hack property.

We've been on BP for around a month now and have found the forums, calculators and podcast SOOOO helpful! We'd love to expand our network and meet other local REIs. It would be great to get some insight from some others that know the area, and possibly share some of the little knowledge we might have as well. If you're from Holland or West Michigan and would like to connect, please reply or send an IM.

Cheers!

The wife and I are both really excited about our current plan but I'd really like some advice before we make a decision. Any house hacking projections we have done look good and doable in the short term and very profitable in the long term. I fear we are being too optimistic and ignoring some big red flags. A rough outline of our plan is below.

A bit of our background: The wife and I are newer to REI and planning on house hacking the first property we buy. Both of us have good jobs and are able to sock away roughly 2k a month in our current rental which is $600/month. We're used to living well below our means and in less than desirable living conditions. Growing up, both my parents had been landlords for periods of time, and I've experienced first hand what bad tenants can do. I worked with my dad cleaning up and rehab properties that had been trashed, I even have the scars to prove it! *Side note - don't leave two 6th grade boys alone with a nail gun!*

Our current plan: We are looking at a run down tri-plex with 3 sketchy tenants. One of the tenants is on a month to month lease, so we would plan on moving into that unit as soon as his/her lease is up. We plan to slowly improve the property as we live there, paying cash and doing a majority of the improvements ourselves. We will also be transition out the current renters and get new tenants that we will be screening more thoroughly. We have enough cash for a down payment, closing costs, some initial fixes and about 10k left over as a reserve. If the two remaining renters kept paying we would have around -$450 cash flow/month, with no renters the property would cash flow around -$1700 which we could still afford on our salaries. I am projecting that over the next year we could improve the property and raise rents so when we moved out and were renting all 3 units we would be around $600-800 cash flow/month, with a CoC ROI of over 15%.

So all that said... Worst case scenario we pay more for housing than we are currently but would be able to get by, best case we would have a very good investment property. Is there anything big I'm missing? Is there anything the renters could do to put us underwater? 

Any and all insight would be very appreciated! I can also send over my BP rental reports to anyone generous enough to take a look.

Thanks in advance!

Sorry my question is a little misleading. I'm planning on getting a 30yr fixed rate mortgage from a bank. But I do not want the lender to calculate my interest rate for a property if I can get a reasonable estimate myself. Since I'm in no rush to buy it could be a year or so before we make a move and I don't want to have to get multiple credit checks if I can avoid it.

Is there a good method to accurately determine what my mortgage rate would be without using a lender? 

The wife and I both have good credit, 10+ years of credit history, and work at W-2 jobs. We're looking at purchasing a multi-family property as either our main residents or an investment property. I'd like the ability to calculate what mortgage rate I can expect to get on different properties without having to use a lender each time.