All Forum Posts by: Max Gradowitz

You want a lawyer for forming the LLC. You want a CPA for tax advice. There are plenty of ways to find a good local attorney and CPA, even searching here on BiggerPockets (or Yelp, or whatever).

Welcome! I'm also an attorney here in CA, although I prefer to invest in-state in the Central Valley. I prefer being within driving distance of the property for a few different reasons. I highly suggest finding your local REI meeting to see what others have had success with (in state versus out of state, flips versus buy and hold, etc). Good luck!

Paying an attorney a small flat fee to review your lease and give you a quick rundown of the important stuff is money well spent.  You may find a term you aren't comfortable with and choose to counter that.

Remember, ALL lease terms are negotiable.  You DO NOT have to just accept your landlord's lease the way it is.  Even commercial tenants seem to forget this.

What can go wrong is that you may not be able to get the refinance loan later for various reasons.  Maybe something regarding the condition of the property itself, or a change in your finances, or various other random scenarios.  What if someone hacks your identity and lowers your credit score?  Not your fault at all, but maybe you won't be able to get a loan for a long time while you settle that matter.  So, if you can't get the refinance loan for whatever reason, maybe have a backup plan.  Contact an attorney and get all the agreement in writing, and any backup plan in writing, to reduce the risk of inter-family drama/lawsuits.

And I think you can only pull out 80% of appraised value on a refinance like this.  Although I'm not a loan officer, so I could be wrong about this.

Welcome!  Consider the Central Valley for inexpensive rentals.  The cash flow is good here for CA.

Wow, really?  Based on on your personal experience, it takes 4-6 months to evict a non-paying tenant in California?

That's interesting, because I do evictions all the time in California, and the evictions I've done for non-payment of rent take a total of about 1 month or so to complete.  Could be different in rent controlled areas I suppose, but you shouldn't invest in those areas anyway..

I think that it's best to connect with a real estate lawyer in your area if you expect to need real estate related legal services in the future.  If you do go with a legal insurance type of service, make sure it provides you the ability to choose a lawyer that specializes in the topic.  I'm a lawyer member of one of these companies (no need to state the name - PM me if you'd like that info) and it works that way.  It's a legal insurance company, but the company themselves will help you identify your specific legal issue and then link you up with a local lawyer that specializes in that area.  So when people connect to me through that company, they do so because they have a real estate or business law issue (landlord/tenant stuff, drafting contracts, etc), and are not looking to pursue a personal injury lawsuit or something that I have no experience in.  Make sure you do your research!

Bakersfield is a great market for multi-units. Cap rates are really high here, probably comparable or better than Fresno, although it's a similar market in terms of growth and appreciation.  It varies depending on neighborhood - some neighborhoods work better for multi-family compared to others.  Feel free to PM me for more info.

Depends on what you are trying to do.  You can't act facilitate a sale between a buyer and seller for a fee and bypass your broker.  Escrow will likely not provide an agent's commission to an agent directly, only to a brokerage.

If you are trying to buy a property for yourself only, and you don't want brokerages involved, then I highly suggest having an attorney draft the required paperwork for a small flat fee.  If you are a licensed Realtor that practices at all, you should know of and have access to the standard CAR purchase agreements and state and locale-specific disclosures, and you should be used to filling these out all the time.  If you are licensed but don't practice, you really should have brokerages involved, or at the very least have an attorney do it for a small flat fee.  It's not about whether some random "Staples" contract works or not, it's about protecting the parties from lawsuits in the future (and as a practical matter, title companies here prefer the CAR forms anyway).

Yes, extremely competitive, at least in SoCal.  Not to discourage you, but most people that ask me about wholesaling in SoCal end up never completing a single wholesale transaction in SoCal.  Not all, but a large majority.  That's what I've experienced.

It's not that it's too expensive of a market, it's not an under-supply of distressed homes, it's simply that SoCal is an over-saturated market for investors. You can't really compete with the people that have been mass mailing using thousands of dollars and many years of followup going towards snatching all the off-market deals in the SoCal markets. Many of them can perform themselves and don't even need to wholesale to an end-buyer, so people in distress prefer that anyway.