All Forum Posts by: Neil Ginty

Hey @Nicole Masters, yeah we did well getting this one and definitely wouldn't get it for that price now - we just jumped on it and had a great agent help us get it over the line
This was in North Sac, in a really nice pocket just off El Camino Ave

Hi BP Community,

As part of mine and my wife's investment strategy, I gave up my W2 safety net to launch my own architectural firm. I want to provide a resources/FAQs section on my website for what we do and am hoping the BP community can help by firing some questions at me!? 
A few examples: I've been asked a few times already if we do Building Permitting! I thought it was an obvious yes, but maybe its just obvious to me!? Some other starters: Can we do structural design? Yes, if its straightforward but less so if we need to do calcs for the City. Can we do site design? Layouts yes, but for details you will need a Civil Engineer. 

Please, ask me anything! It will be a big help... I also want to do the same for ADUs, so throw those in as well

@Osazee Edebiri, you got any??

I'm Hayward but close enough!

@Nash Mittelman, Oakland is actually one of the city's with it's own pre-approved plan sets that @Paul Dario Jr mentioned but its is a 25'x25' box so won't work on every site.

The other alternate is doing a prefab, there's quite a few companies doing that now since the 2020 legislation passed. They have their own typical sets of plans that can be tweaked by their own architects/engineers. I will actually be doing just that for my own primary residence. I can draft it but I want to save the construction costs and just do prefab. I will, however, be telling them where to put it on the site. The design challenge with prefabs is making sure you position it right on the site so that it is of maximum benefit to the main house and the ADU.

@Cindy Tansin
I'm an architect and even I am about relinquish the design process to save on the costs to put one of those onto my own primary residence. Watch out for the difference between Modular/prefab v. Manufactured/mobile homes (you don't want the latter). We are using a company called adu.works - they're designs are terrible but cannot beat the price, they have a base in SoCal too as I understand.

Usually with the prefabs there's a little wiggle room for design, but it could be as much as just mirroring the plan or sliding windows here or there, nothing too drastic. The trick then is about how to actually position it on the site to maximize it for both you and your tenant. With the units being pretty small but the weather being so good, we are trying to make sure they have a good, private outdoor area.

Great work! Such a great return

Hi @Don Konipol

The mid-term rentals strategy has been working really well for us in the Bay Area to make deals work, there's a lot of demand for it and is proving a nice little niche in the market. Our units are pretty much what you would expect from STR in terms of stuff we provide, just not quite the higher end stuff you see in some true STRs

 @Mikhail Petrenko 

I'll respond slightly differently here... we have done this twice as it happens, both in Sacramento. We didn't sell but did refinance which throws up the same appraiser / lending issues. We had a duplex which we added an ADU to, and a SFH we converted to a "triplex". Both of which the appraiser just treated as "triplexes" - the inverted commas being because that's not really what they were! Really, it came down to what will they look like when they're done? Ours were plausible triplexes BUT there was a bit of a gamble involved. DM me if you're up for digging into more of the detail. Happy to share!!

Hi Mikhail,

We actually did something very similar in Sacramento, they also allow two ADUs. For us, every time we ran the numbers the "triplex" just made more sense, plus the layout just screamed triplex. When you have to do so much work, whether its 1 or 2 ADUs, the better compounding returns was always 2 ADUs. The tricky part we had was the refinancing, I'm not sure where the F&F rules are at with 2 ADUs now but we did manage to get ours refinanced, almost a full BRRR, and appraiser treated it as a triplex. We called it a triplex to lenders and a house with 2 ADUs to the City when they were looking for impact fees and utility fees!

Couple of things to watch out for, 2 attached dwellings are considered Residential for Building Code purposes. Once you go to 3 attached dwellings or more, there's a good chance they will make you treat it as a "Commercial" project for Building Permit approval. That means a change of use and, for us, meant sprinklers and making one unit ADA adaptable. Returns were still very much worth it but 2 attached units + 1 detached is potentially more economical. And if it "looks" like a triplex, all the better for refinancing too!

Hope that helps!!

@Charles Clark

There's pretty much always some way to make it work. We are in the Bay Area which is a notoriously ridiculous market, but are making it work with mid-term rentals.