All Forum Posts by: Michael Verkruyse

Working to help provide search and real-time data mining/analytics on data lakes for large companies. The data isn't necessarily too big for Hadoop, but doing it in an efficient manner requires a better mechanism. Without diving too deep in the weeds, Apache Spark allows the RAM to be leveraged more than Hadoop/MapReduce, which allows real-time operations to be realistic.

Scraping that data could be an interesting method for marketing!

If you truly wanted to get into RE big data mining, you could consider natural language classification techniques to see what patterns exist and if there are words/groups of words that predict good deals. 

You could also look at time series data for listing prices to make a statistical prediction on pricing bands which would help you make an optimal winning offer before a price drop causes an influx of competitor buyers. 

There's truly a lot out there in the realm of big data. My day job is in a field where traditional big data solutions (Hadoop on computer clusters) isn't even efficient enough, which has put the focus on resilient data structures (RDD's) and Apache Spark as a foundation for alternative solutions. A bit overkill for what you were mentioning, but it's interesting to think about!

Happy to chat more, and as always feel free to connect!

Hi Julie, 

Welcome! I'm new to the BP as well, and it's always good to meet another investor in the Seattle area! Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Hi Denita, 

Just wanted to let you know that it is possible to get Excel for Mac, I have a Mac computer at work and I have Excel running on it.

Anyway, congrats on the property, it sounds like you found a gem!

With no credit/assets/income/proven history you're going to have to leverage relationships you have in order to get funding, and even then, it'll be an uphill battle.

The best bet would be to find a partner/investor willing to take a risk on you, if you have a portfolio which details your experience that would be a good first step.

Appreciate the response @Larry.

In this case I'm pretty comfortable with the comps, $240,000 is actually the low for the area/size with an average in the $270,000 over the last 6 months. I've just started talking to my realtor from my primary residence purchase (my only RE experience to draw on) to verify my comps are reasonable. The deal becomes far more palatable with a larger spread.

I'm not overly concerned with making a killing on this first deal (although obviously it wouldn't hurt), I really am looking at it as an opportunity to get some hands-on experience, and to enhance my ability in assessing repair costs and my knowledge of the local market. My day job is analytically oriented, so by nature I won't make a deal unless I'm sound in the numbers; at the same time I've seen it mentioned here numerous times that the biggest recommendation is to start making actions.

Hope your week is going well as we approach Thanksgiving, and as always thanks for the advice!

Hi all, new to the real estate investing arena but interested in starting. I’ve doing some research around my area for potential properties with needs for cosmetic/moderate improvements that I could flip, and I believe I’ve found one. I’ve done some analysis with the numbers below, and I was wondering if anyone could validate if there is anything blatant that I’m missing? Appreciate the help in advance.

Thanks guys, appreciate the links.

Curious on your perspective(s), since I'm coming into this as a complete greenhorn, would it be worthwhile to try to find a mentor at this stage, or would my efforts be better focused on reading/absorbing material from this site/books for a while first?

Hi Jason, I'm new to BP too, and also from Covington, WA. We should connect sometime!

Hi all, I'm a new member to BiggerPockets and the Real Estate Investing arena from Covington, WA. Glad to meet you all and hope to be active on these forums.

If anyone in the area is in the midst of investing, I'm interested in getting some hands-on experience, and I'm happy to help in any way I can!