All Forum Posts by: Matt Bowers

Thanks everyone so far! I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your answers. I even read them aloud to my wife to make sure we're both getting the same info. 

@stever23 thanks for this, I laughed out loud. We have had plenty of wine lately (we are in Chile!) so I guess I'll count it. 

@chrism93 Thanks for the HELOC advice. If we don't sell, this seems like a no-brainer.

@zq4444 at the moment we have done small houses that are split into a few units. That's where the opportunity was. I want to have 15-20 units. We have 5 right now. (2 units in one place, 3 in the other.) 

@jlh thanks for saying the counter argument. That's good to hear. Yeah, @r2chi2, it was owner occupant. We lived there for 26 months. Right now is the first we've considered selling... We don't want to. As far as finance, paying off the other loan makes sense, the rate is .625% higher. 

@aaronv5 what makes you say "if it's some mansion you'd sell it?" in our case it's 3000sqft and the basement rents out separately from the upstairs. 

Hi all - I'm curious what everyone would do in my position. Happy to hear all opinions, and thanks in advance. 

My wife and I are hoping to build a portfolio for long term buy and hold. We have two properties right now. One, we purchased in 2013 for $500k with $100k as down payment. The property is worth about $800-900k now. Lucky. Mortgage is 30 yrs at 3.25%, full payment incl ins and taxes is about $2300/mo. It rents for $5700/mo. 

Now we've got about $450k equity in it... what would you guys do? I'm tempted to hold on to it, but I know other people would 1031 into something bigger?

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum... it was a tough choice.

Hi everyone - 

I'm in Seattle and own a property with 3 units that have been there forever (40+ years). Trouble is, it is zoned single family and has a permit for a non-conforming DUPLEX. So it is legal for 2, but not 3 units.

Does anyone here have experience dealing with DPD, finding phone records, and proving that the building has always been this way? 

Thanks.
Matt

Thanks Joel - just saw this now. Super helpful to think about it this way. We did some more evaluation and for one of the properties, market value is $600 higher than they were paying. Some real numbers behind the rent increases which we settled on:

Unit 1: was 900, going to 1150.

Unit 2: was 1150, going to 1750.

Unit 3: was 1300, going to 1750.

So, making the change is a huge part of our cash flow plan even including vacancies. Hopefully in our market it will only be open for about 30 days. I just rented out another unit 40 days in advance, and there will only be 5 days of vacancy!

Update for everyone else - I delivered an info packet the day after we got the property, happened to be August 1st. All of the tenants were courteous and good people. Happy to have them there for now. I gave them 60 days notice of the price increase, as is required by law. As many of you suggested, they've all indicated they'll be leaving. We'll see how it goes! We're starting to plan the upgrades so we can get top $ rent.

Relay Rides is a pretty great way to go. Home depot has $19/hr rentals, but you can get a truck on RR for $29 or less, for the day! There are some taxes and fees on top of that but it's nice to not be in a huge rush to save $19 if you're a few minutes late.

@Justin Case HA! Nice work. Thanks for saying hi.

@Dmitriy Fomichenko Thanks for the links!

@Edward Synicky Wise words, I think! I'll check out MEET.

Thanks @Account Closed and everyone else as well. I'll update the thread when we close and maybe again later with how everything is going. 

Hopefully everything works out... will be an awesome learning experience either way.

@Cole Walker yep, headquarters is actually downtown on 2nd and Union! I love working here. Let me know if you find any bugs and I'll try to get them fixed.

@Michele Fischer @Zach Schwarzmiller @Dave Visaya Thanks for the welcome! 

My name is Matt Bowers - I'm from the Seattle area and I work at Zillow. I guess that's where a lot of my real estate background comes from... absorption. My wife and I bought a big house with an apartment basement about 18 months ago, did the renovation ourselves and are renting it out for ~$1500. We enjoy being landlords enough that we're currently in the process of closing on a multifamily in Ballard.

My long term goal is to be a full time real estate investor, managing my own properties. We would prefer to invest in Seattle, but it's pretty tough to find properties that make fiscal sense.

I'm especially interested to hear from the rest of you about the places you're investing around the Northwest! Looking forward to meeting you. (if you work in downtown Seattle, I'd love to have lunch sometime.)

Thanks for all the feedback everyone! I appreciate it a lot. 

• I've joined Puget Sound Rental Housing Association - anyone familiar with that?
• I did learn that in Seattle you can't raise rent more than 10% unless you give 60 days notice. So we're okay to raise like that.
• We're thinking we'll give them an info packet with new rules, a list of things we're going to fix for them (they wrote requests in the estoppel), the rent they can expect.
• We're going to try to sign them to month-to-month leases on day 1 with a 60 day notice of rent increase.

One question I still have is about deposits. I think that the previous landlord took deposits illegally - there's no evidence of a condition report given or received. But there are about $1600 worth of deposits acknowledged on the estoppels. How can I bring those back to legal status? And should I be asking for more deposits for the new month-to-month leases?

If anyone has something to add, please let me know.