All Forum Posts by: Michael D.

The plan would be to use the assets for retirement, though we might want to sell them and/or buy more along the way. IOW, active real estate investment.

When one of us dies, the assets would remain in the trust managed by the survivor. When the second of us dies we'd like the assets to pass smoothly to our children.

Michael

Does Skype provide a phone number that people can call, or is it outbound only?

@Tanna Brodbar , it's certainly nice to use "actual" expenses that the seller provides, but keep in mind that they may not have been as diligent about repairs and maintenance as they should have been. This may be why the expenses are low and the place doesn't look so great right now.

As far as reserves, try to make up your own actual numbers for things that have a fairly well-defined lifespan. For example:

Roof: $10,000, 240 month life = $42/mo

Water heater: $1000, 120 month life = $8/mo

AC...

Furnace...

etc

I've also used HRS Law a number of times, and I like them a lot.

I've been using Arbors for a while now to manage a few SFD and I like them a lot. They are one of the larger managers in the area with thousands of units.

I'm also in the process of switching a small apartment building over to Mace and I like them well so far, but it's early days.

You'll find that you need to match the manager to the property. You want one that has other units in the area and at your price point.

For me, I also like to work with managers that are very technology savvy. They respond to text messages. They have good cloud based management software. They can take decent pictures and send them easily. They don't put things in snail-mail.

@David Krulac - I'm actually finding them over in your neck of the woods (sort of). I'm buying properties in the Pittsburgh area. Great cash-flow, but too cheap for regular mortgages.

@Dawn Anastasi , thanks for the advice.

@Bob Hines , I like the commercial LOC idea. I'll look into that.

I also just read another post about Blackrock's B2R program. I'm going to check into that as well.

I've been purchasing a number (4 so far) of cheap houses (<$50k) with cash, and now I'd like to get my equity back out of them to buy more. I'd also like to figure out a plan for being able to do this smoothly in the future. By a cheap house, stabilize it with repairs and a tenant, and get all or most of the equity back.

Regular residential mortgages don't seem to make sense, because I can only seem to get 4 of them and anyway the costs are so high relative to the amount of the loan.

I can't be the only one. Where should I be looking for money?

Thanks,

Michael

Here's a question: How do you approach financing some of the cheaper properties such as those that exist in the Pittsburgh area? I've got a few <$50,000 that I paid cash for, and now I want my money out. With properties this cheap it just seems like the financing costs are too darn high to be worth it - but then again I can't keep paying cash for everything either. I need to get my money back out to keep making forward progress.

Michael

As many others have said, you need to find out what they intend to do.

Almost certainly they want others to live in the other unit. That's fine, but you can't lease them both units. You need to have two separate leases, one for each unit. Only (and all) the people who are going to be living in that particular unit would be tenants on that lease, and credit/background/income is run on all. If the other set of people don't qualify they can have a CO-SIGNER (can be the people you're talking to), but the co-signer is NOT a tenant on that lease.

This keeps everything very clear, and everybody knows what they are accountable for. Full transparency. It's critical that you know exactly who your tenants are at all times and have full control of that.

As long as you've got that in place, I think this is GREAT news. Count your blessings to fill both units so easily.

If you want diversity, buy another one.

Michael

@Sam Leon , my understanding is that Drano does not harm pipes, whether copper or otherwise. Sometimes though there seems to be a correlation because Drano often gets used when there is already a lot of wear-and-tear on the pipes and they are already quite thin.

Some clog-removers are acidic and react with copper, but not Drano.