All Forum Posts by: Neerav Patel

@Kristy Pedersen Portfolio lenders are really selective on which areas that they loan in because they want to know areas pretty well. Ones that I usually uses are Harleysville bank, Victory bank, QNB bank. Message me if you want to get loan officers information. 

Seems like you are buying it in Philly. Most likely they want to be in Montgomery and Bucks county, but you never know or they might point to someone that does loan in that area.

Personally I think 2 points are higher and I am pretty sure they will charge you more interest rate as well. My opinion is to use HELOC since you have that available. And I know PFFCU does do loans in that area for pretty small closing cost with reasonable interest rate. So might be good option to explore for refinance( I think they won't loan for house that needs work).

@Kristy Pedersen That's nice to hear that you found a good property. In past when we had HELOC money, we have always used that since that was cheapest money we could get at the time.

I completely understand double closing pain, so we did newer loan structure with our portfolio lender that we haven't done it in past. We got as completed appraisal and they created loan for 75% of total apprised amount, but they only gave us 75% of purchase price and put rest in escrow and they will disperse that money when we complete whole rehab. So no double closing, no extra fees and it is 30 year fix loan. Only downside is we have to pay interest on that money that is in escrow and we are not using currently which is not too bad.

Maybe try talking with your portfolio lender (if you have one, this might be a good time to look for one) to see if they can accommodate your request.

Thanks a lot for your reply @Chris Martino

I started to explore CE shop , seems like they have pretty good course. Your recommendation helped me a lot. Most likely I will enroll in that.

And do you recommend any specific brokerage or office to work under after getting my license? I am pretty new at this and don't know much about industry standard or runtime expense for being relator.

Hi fellow BP members,

I am also having trouble with relators as many of you had inthe past. I can't go to houses that want to see with my timelines, sometimes gets pressure for higher offer prices, not getting a faster response (all pain points that investors have with relators).

I interviewed many of reltors, changed 3 times. It starts off great but always ends up similiar.

So we have decided to get our PA realtor licence to grow our business.

Can you please recommend us online classes that are required for the relator exam? Any specific site you recommend?

After examination, I also need to work under a broker. Does anyone has a recommendation for broker's office for Philadelphia suburbs in Montgomery county?

We want to do that for us but not against having clients.(Since we find deals all the time that deosn't work with our criteria but other home buyers would love it)

Thanks a lot for your help and time

Investment Info:

Single-family residence buy & hold investment in North Wales.

Purchase price: $190,000
Cash invested: $30,000

This is our primary home and first deal. We bought it , renovated it and Raised value of property to more than $100,000.
After that we got heloc on that spread and used that to buy more properties.
We currently rent out one room upstairs in Airbnb and our garage and live almost free, since those 2 income combined are more than our mortgage, tax and insurance

What made you interested in investing in this type of deal?

We were planning to buy our primary care home.One of our major concern was, what if we have to sell that soon, than we will loose money and started to do research to avoid it. And that is how we found BRRR method

How did you find this deal and how did you negotiate it?

We found it on foreclosure of HUD. We put more than 30k above asking offer because it already had more than 25 offer and it was massively lower than it should be

How did you finance this deal?

We did traditional 80-20% mortgage

How did you add value to the deal?

We rehabbed whole inside, including HVAC, flooring, new kitchen, new baths, paint. We did many of work ourselves to save money

What was the outcome?

Property price increased almost if not more than $100k

Lessons learned? Challenges?

Contractors were the biggest challenges, but learning and executing on it with hard work usually pays off

Did you work with any real estate professionals (agents, lenders, etc.) that you'd recommend to others?

Agent -Adam Wachter(Highly recommended)
Bank- Hatboro Federal Savings(local bank and highly highly recommended)
Thanks to loan officer Lee Bergiven

@Alex Varner I usually ask for their licence, insurance and few references. So incase they go south on you , you can complain to state or state attorney general's office.

I usually use 2 part contract created by J.scott author of "Book on estimating rehab". I got those contracts from biggerpockets and make contractor sign it. I use online free service called concordnow for signing.

@Ricky Bass Thanks a lot. You are absolutely right, first deal is usually the hardest. I will update this post with link to new post when I make new one.

This is my first success story and it is truly long overdue, so please accept my apologies. 

Biggerpockets helped me tremendously for this success and want to thank the whole community for that.

Since I was working as an IT contractor, I used to switch places very fast. After marriage, we decided to buy our house. But we were shocked when the agent told us that generally speaking if you buy home and sell in before 5-7 years, you actually loose money since we have to account for commissions, taxes, repairs, etc. So I started looking for alternatives to avoid that and that's how I found out biggerpockets and BRRR methodology.

We did study hard for real estate knowledge including books, podcast and area. Put lots of offer and always missed by something. After that from one podcast we found out that some foreclosures (specially government ones like HUD, Fannie mae, etc) offers owner occupant bid times for few days. We did find few properties like that but again was beaten to that race most of the time.

ntil one day in morning, I saw one property in HUD site in the perfect neighborhood. We went to see a very same day. The property was in a very good neighborhood and was way lower priced. But we did notice something odd. Property was listed as 3 bed 2.5 bath but was 4 bed and 3.5 bath and sqft looked off too. When I went to the county website, I realized they did not counted upstairs at all(It is cape cod). They were off by 300 sqft 1 bed and 1 full bath off.

HUD has 10 day timeline for all owner occupants to bid, so when we went there again to check it out on 9th day, there were 35 agent cards on kitchen countertop. We did realize that it is a fierce competition. So we did shoot very high and finally got the property.

Below are details-

Asking - $167k 

Listed as- 1650 sqft 3 bed 2.5 bath 2 car garage

Repairs needed - Flooring, HVAC(radiant to forced air with AC), 2 full bath remodel, deck rebuild, Kitchen remodel, appliances, new gutters, small plumbing, sewer line repair going to main, garage roof repair, raccoon living on garage attic , tree removal, landscaping

Offered price - $191k

Original - 1919 sqft 4 bed 3.5 bath 2 car garage

We got our property, renovated it and did many things ourselves such as painting, bath remodels. We were also fortunate that township was doing sewer work and they did fix our problem with no cost.

Total repair expenses - $30k

ARV - $330k

Before picture

After Picture

We refinance and got HELOC from that spread and rolled into other property. I will not go into details about that one just to keep it from being too long.

We also started Airbnb with our upstairs bedroom and start renting our garage and those basically pays mortgage and a small amount left from it sometimes.

We are really fortunate that we found biggerpockets and want to thank whole community. 

Hopefully, my story can help someone in the future.

@Vic Reddy @Jeff V. Thank you both for your valuable input.

Yes, they do have renters insurance which is part of our lease requirement.

I believe they wanted something for damage to their rug and TV damage.

Here is what my thoughts are:

As @Jeff V. mentioned, I agree that it is mechanical problem and it should not be our responsibility other than removing water. otherwise there will be sense of entitlement going forward

At same time they are nice people and I do want longer relation with them.

So I am thinking that I should give them option that I can use shop vac to remove some water from rug and loan them my space heater for some time , so they can resuse rug.

Sounds reasonable? 

Hi all,

In past whenever I had questions, I always turn to BP and it always is helpful, so asking one more question.

I am a new landlord and yesterday at 8.30 pm tenant reported that there is about 2 inch of water in basement. I went there within an hour and take care of water issue. We had new sump pump in property but due to shaking of pump , float switch was leaning on concrete and wasn't working. I fixed that while I was there yesterday night.

I just got text form them saying thank you for work and asking discount in next month rent due to damage to rug and some damage to tv.

In your experience , is it a reasonable request? should I give them some discount in rent or give them gift card of some sort or should not do either?

Thank you for all of your time and help. 

Looking forward to your thoughts