All Forum Posts by: Nathan Waters

@Asif I., I'll keep in touch if I come across anything. 

@Lee S., Thanks for the advice. I am looking at other commercial lenders in the area. Again, these houses are really cheap and for the most part I can pay cash for them, but I just spent my reserves on the rehab of the recent one so I need to build it back up again. Hopefully I'll be able to put something together in the next two months or so.

to piggy back on what @Jeff Dulla said, even Joliet varies greatly from just a few blocks away. Its good to be familiar with the area. There are some areas I won't invest. And I love investing in the low income neighborhoods. 

i invest in Joliet. The taxes are as reasonably-priced as you'll find around where i live. If you're willing to go to Indiana, I've heard there are better tax rates and still affordable. But I'm not as familiar with that area. 

1140 for a 2 bedroom 1 bath two car garage. Tenant pays all utilities

@Jonathan Frausto, We closed a week before thanksgiving day. We have been marketing for about 3 weeks. We could have probably got someone in within 6-8 weeks but the holidays slowed us down a bit. We also priced it very agressively to try to attract section 8 tenants. It took a while to get someone in there but we are going to have what looks to be a very long term tenant. So we're really excited.

Naperville would probably be better for flipping based on the relatively high prices. I don't have the stomach for flipping at this time. I like the get rich slow strategy of buy and hold

@Asif I. & @Matthew Murphy, The 3 in Joliet were off the MLS. The out of state rental that I have was my previous home and I kept it as a rental but will be selling it this summer. I've been managing the one long distance rental for 7-8 years but the 3 here locally are recent. I bought 2 in 2015 and one back in November 2016. As far as purchasing, two of them were paid cash. I used savings, a loan from my 401K, and a personal loan from SOFI to pay for the 2 houses and the renovation costs. I did cash out refinance on both homes after 6 months and used proceeds to pay back the loan and as a fund for the down payment and rehab costs for the recent home. My lender says I need to wait 12 months before they will cash out refinance this most recent one. It has about 30-40K in available equity above the current mortgage so I'm anxious to pull that out and do another deal.

Two are west Joliet. One is south east. The good deals are harder to come by than 2 years ago. Just gotta keep your eyes open and be willing to make lots of offers

@Andrew Hargreave,

This is our 3rd rental in Joliet and all 3 are turning up as good investments so far. We have 4 rentals total and will be selling the out of state home this summer and using the proceeds to buy more in Joliet. One of the big concerns (there are definitely more than one) in Joliet is the age of the homes. We try to make sure our buy in is low and we resolve any big issues up front. We replaced all the windows on each house and with this last one, we replaced the roof and all flooring as well as a few other things to bring it up to a nicer standard. Its one way to mitigate unexpected issues in the future. The first one was a huge learning experience but it turned out well. It really tested our commitment. I think it was one of those properties that would have broken people that are not really cut out for this. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. But it made us hungrier for more and I love investing in the Joliet area. 

I invest in Joliet IL which is a somewhat low income area of older homes. I bought this house for 40K, put 20K into it and brought it up to our standards for a rental. We have a new tenant moving in within a week. The renovation took about 2 months because the holidays slowed us down a bit. But all in all, I'm really excited. We are getting $1400 a month. Ready for the next deal.