All Forum Posts by: Melissa Barnard

Hello @Dave Brodie, I wouldn't beat yourself up over just finding this out. Contracts are sometimes very foreign if you are not familiar with them! Most agents will only take the commission fee paid by the seller and be done with it, especially if you are a repeat customer. It seems like you have a greedy agent on your hands. Unfortunately, it is the buyer's job to read over the contract and can even have any lawyer review it as well so the agent really isn't required to tell you that they put that in there. You would just think out of good faith that they would. I would personally find a different agent that you can fully trust and that will not take your money intended for investing!

@Brent Paul If you don't want to go the hard money route then I would say your best bet is to come in with a potentially 'stronger' offer. Offer over asking and put as much as you can down for the earnest money. In some seller's eyes this will outweigh a cash offer. 

@Kyle Swarts The benefits of purchasing a home through an LLC is to protect yourself and the assets you own. If something goes horribly wrong then it's your company that goes down. If someone tries to sue you for something then they have to sue your company. A lot of investors will do this to be smart on the liability side as well as potential bankruptcies. Some investors will also create an LLC for each investment property they own or maybe will group some together. On the flip side, if you signed as yourself, you are personally 100% liable for everything.

@Christopher Lessing I have a lot of clients that are investors and every single one of them will get an  inspection done. As a realtor, we can only point out so many things to bring to your attention. With that not being our actual profession certain liabilities could arise. Overall, inspections are not that much money and could potentially be saving you thousands of dollars in the future. You can also use the report for negotiating purposes so I would recommend getting an inspection done on any property. 

Hey @James Nguyen, welcome to real estate industry! It is definitely not an easy field to get into but if you market yourself, network and be consistent with your methods then you've got a shot. Get yourself a mentor through your brokerage so you can ask a bunch of questions along the way. Utilize BP with the forums, podcasts and learn as much as you can! Good Luck!

@Joshua Stratton

I am not sure what the laws are in Michigan but here in Texas you wouldn't be able to. Any commission you receive must be given to you directly through your brokerage and there are no exceptions. It seems like you do have an active license and if that is the case then it makes yourself even more liable if you were to try and get a commission on the side somehow. I would definitely steer clear of this 100% or talk to your broker on what you can do. Also if everything was just stated verbally and not written or within a contract then you may not be able to go forward with getting paid in general. 

@Christopher Grobbel You are correct on that! The supply is very thin in comparison to SFH and you'll see the prices getting pushed up from investors coming in with cash offers. Overall it is a very difficult market to be in but depending on your investment strategy it can still work out in your favor.

Unfortunately, you will see a lot of multi-family houses mislabeled on the MLS. That is just due to agents inputting the information wrong or not being familiar with the multi-family market in general. I have seen this all around DFW so it isn't just in Dallas. Do you currently have a realtor that has set you up on emails? The emails I have set up for my clients do not show an abundance mislabeled multi-family properties so it could be how the search is set up as well. Let me know if you'd like my help on that end!

I agree with @Charles Carillo here!  @Mergim Gjyriqi You have come so far so I would definitely stay out of debt your last year of college. If you still have some money left over you could find someone to partner up with or you could use your strengths to partner up with someone in a different way. There are a lot of methods to invest in real estate, you just need to do some research to figure out which one works for you. 

@Jade Vaughn Yay, that's exciting news!! So I personally did it online through UTA and I would honestly not recommend it. Champions school of real estate is 10x better if you can do their courses online. I did a crash course in Ft Worth before my test and it helped tremendously. I know you aren't in the DFW area but I know they for sure offer classes online. It all depends on how you learn but I wish that I paid more attention to the details of the contract course or have taken that one in class. Since I took it online, I felt like I did miss out on people explaining real life scenarios within the business and going over the contracts in general. That shouldn't be too much of an issue for you since you are already using contracts for wholesaling and interacting in the real estate world. Let me know if you have anymore questions and good luck!

Full disclosure is always best! As long as the parties in the transaction know that you have an active license then you have nothing to worry about.