All Forum Posts by: Mary Jo Carruthers

@Chris Kittle

Have you thought about your exit strategy? Exit strategy to me is just as important as the purchase.  For example, can  you make one of the units short term rental thereby increasing the noi and thereby the value? Condo the units out? Or maybe just buy and hold. Will you be improving the units over time? If so then you should have a serious conversation with your cpa to figure out the tax benefits of pursuing one strategy over another? 

1% Earnest money is the norm here in the Austin Texas metro. So if its 350k expect 3500$. If its a 6 mil land deal which is what I am working on currently, the expected em is 60k. 

Some contractors will give you a line item invoice about how much each task cost. Ask to get a break down and then compare it to the one for 9k. You may even ask him to give you a profit margin percentage on each task. The job could have scaled up and he went forward without communicating with you which is a big no no and may be he should eat some of the costs due to the miscommunication. But you don't want to bankrupt the guy if he thought that he was trying to help you out. If his margins are low you could bankrupt him if going after him with legal action. In bankruptcy, he could get out of paying you but that comes with a steep cost for him. Before you go to an attorney I think that you should ask to see a break down of the expenses and try to come to some sorta reasonable outcome. Sometimes the only person that wins in a legal situation are the attorneys.

Excerpts from a good article in the Austin business journal on Austin's metro hottest submarkets.

"Neighborhoods on the shores of Lake Travis, in Round Rock and in Driftwood are among the hottest housing markets in the Austin area. That's according to The Business Journals' inaugural hottest housing markets ranking, which is based on third-quarter listing and sales data from Intercontinental Exchange Inc. Overall, the 78726 ZIP code ranked No. 21 among the hottest ZIP codes in Texas. 
The average listing price has risen 71% since the third quarter of 2023

The second hottest ZIP code in the metro is Driftwood’s 78619

Surprisingly, the third hottest neighborhood was 78664. Round Rock’s 78664 ZIP code rounded out the metro's top three, with 164 new listings compared to 98 listings sold in the third quarter this year. Homes there carried an average listing price of $404,585, an average sale price of $445,651 and spent an average of 72 days on the market."

https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2024/11/07/austins-h...