All Forum Posts by: Martin L.

I think you might want to talk to an accountant. My accountant told me that you never really need to worry about income from investment properties because the depreciation, mortgage, expenses, etc will typically negate any income. How I don’t know how it would apply to your outright owned property, but all of my properties are mortgaged. If I understood correctly, if your actual income is below 150k (I’m assuming it’s higher though), you can even use the depreciation to offset any tax burden from your regular income. My first rental property allowed me to actually get a bigger tax refund despite having more income. You also need to be properly depreciating your properties. Again according to my accountant, when you sell, the IRS will treat your sale as if the property had been depreciated, whether you actually did or not. Again, check with an accountant, I’m basing all this off what my accountant told me for the past few years.

Hello all, second time attempting to write this as the app crashed the first time! 

Anyway, I was actually something of an accidental investor.  I was able to put down on a great upgrade in 2011, but the same low market that allowed me to buy my upgrade really made me reluctant to sell my first home.  So I decided to rent it out as my payments were also incredibly low.  By chance my neighbors also had a friends that were looking for a bigger home than they were living in and things just kind of fell into place.  I also bought a fixer upper to try my hand at flipping (definitely not for me) and it became my second rental. 

Flash forward a few years. I got a great offer in Asia shortly after I bought my beautiful new home and that became my third rental. I've since bought a fourth and really like the business, mainly because I haven't had any negative cash flow property yet and they all start to have positive cash flow within two years. Bearing in mind that I have an additional expense of a property manager, I've been in the "get rich slow" camp, looking more towards the future. Thus the ROI and property appreciation have kept me very happy with the business.

I've been lurking in these forums for a few weeks now and decided to start sharing some of my knowledge from the past few years as well as getting more knowledge for the future.  My current interests for diversification are international emerging markets, and since reading these forums I have also become more interested in multi-family.  My property manager was always reluctant to do multi-family but now that I have 4 homes with her, she's more open to my prodding in that direction. 

I made some early sacrifices the first few years, but I've been fortunate enough that I no longer need to as I'm happy to take my time and build slowly. 

Thanks for having me,

Noah, I can suggest what I’ve seen in some emerging markets. Essentially the realtors have partnered with a local management company as well as a bank. They offer a guaranteed ROI and management services over an extended period of time. Sometimes they have owner days. For instance, buy the property for 100k. Sign contract for 15 or 20 year management. Guaranteed ROI of 9% the first five years and then 85/15 split after. 10 owner days a month so they can also enjoy their investment. Personally I’ve only just started looking into this, and there are a huge variety of terms between companies, so I don’t have all the details yet. It looks decent as I’m more interested in potential long term appreciation of these emerging market properties, rather than just cash flow.