All Forum Posts by: Nikki N.

Hey guys, a question, how's your experience with the registered agents? Me and my brother created LLC and since I live in Asia and he lives in San Francisco and our properties are in Indianapolis we took Northwest registered agent with the address in Indiana. And all the way until now we just had that basic one year cost. And now they sent as an email saying that for every mail that they will send us we will need to pay an extra $15.

I was thinking that there wont be anything else besides that basic cost. I have no idea how many mail should we receive in a year? And we are thinking about changing the registered agent if others don't ask for the money for every mail that they receive. Or it is the same with every registered agent?

Thanks for reading :)

Hello and thank you for reading my ( weird) question. :)

I am European and I live and work as an English teacher in China. While I was living in the US ( around 3 months at the beginning of 2016) I opened a bank account in Bank of America. After I came back to China I start doing a lot of full time and part time jobs and I am saving a lot of money here. Together with my brother who is a green card holder in the US, we start investing into real estate, we bought our first duplex in Indy and we are in the procedure of searching for the second property and there is a problem. 

China has very strict regulations about foreigners sending the money outside of China, we are allowed to send only 500 dollars per a day, so for example if I want to send 4000 dollars from China to my bank of America I would have to go to the bank 8 times, in 8 different days and to pay the transfer fee 8 times.  

So the only way to send the money is to put for example 4000 dollars into my Chinese friend bank of China account and then he will send from his Bank of China to my Bank of America. But I am wondering what will IRS think about this transaction? I am non-resident and according to everything that I've read I shouldn't pay any tax, but this will not look like if i send the money to myself, but different Chinese people will be sending the money to me, 2000, 3000, 4000 dollars, depending how much money I was able to save and send. 

So my, hopefully, interesting question for you is- is all of this ok, according to the law ? Will IRS have any problem with me depositing my money this way? And when I start investing this money, because I am working and saving and sending this money to my BoA so that I can invest into real estate together with my brother, can we have any problems with this? Can anybody from the IRS think that this is money laundering or anything like that?

Sorry for the long post and thanks again for reading.

Nikki :)

All of you guys are great, I really, really appreciate all the advice that you gave me, the property was pretty bad when we bought it but i think that it is pretty good now. Both me and my brother live very far away so we didn't actually go there after the renovation, and then we don't know all of these things that Ross mentioned, but yeah, I guess we all agree that not replying to emails is not good and that the communication is not good. We would rather wait for much longer if necessary in order to get good and stable tenants then to rush into it and then get tenants that will be a nightmare for us, but we just want to feel that things are going into the right direction. So I hope that in the future period things will be much better, that the communication will be better, that we will have the tenants as most of you suggested, around 30 days after the duplex was put on the market and that the tenants will be good and stable.

I will let you know what happened.

And thanks to all of you good people out there!

Hello from Beijing :)

My brother and me started long distant rental properties adventure, I live in Beijing and he lives in Sf bay area and we bought a duplex in Irvington, Indianapolis, we found local contractors and renew it, and then we sign a contract with a local PM. Now  PM is not a guy that replies to emails so fast and that kinda worries us, usually we need to write him 2-3 emails before he would reply, and that is not really good, especially at the beginning of our cooperation. That duplex is on the market from June the 1st, today is June 15th, and nothing happened. Maybe our PM have bigger projects, maybe some of the investors want him and his team to do renovation so it is a bigger business for him, or maybe this is just the regular procedure, it is our first property and basically we are still learning about all of this, but the facts are that we are paying for the mortgage, electricity,water, somebody needs to cut the grass especially in this period of the year ( we don't even know is the grass cut or not) and so on.

So I was trying to find out what is the normal period in which the professional PM is going to find tenants and rent the property? I have found on these blogs that it is around 30 days? Or should it be less when there is a professional PM?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Nikki

Soooo, I bought the first duplex and I have some unclear thoughts again so maybe you guys can give me some ideas.

I've found one other PM and I was happy after the interview with him, he is a nice and clever guy, but when we came close to sign a contract he offered me this:

He ( they) will coordinate the project with hired contractors, they will manage my funds so nobody is paid until work is complete, they  DO NOT ALLOW owners to mix with the contractors!! And he will be paid 10%  of the project cost for these services.

Now, I can accept to have a cooperation with this PM without this, he offered me these two options,

1. he is a project ( rehab) managers and the he gets 10% and I get bids and cannot speak with contractors

or

2. I have my own contractors and if he goes to check the house and all the work he will be paid 75$

So, I have two questions that bothers me:

1. Is it normal that PM have this kind of a deal? Isn't that what turnkey companies do? and why shouldn't I be able to speak with contractors? And how can I know that it is not in his interest to make the expenses hire so that his 10% is hire as well?

2. even if I decide to have my own contractors, should I still have a cooperation with this PM? Should I trust him after this kinda shady offer?

Hi guys, Im very close ( when I say I , it actually mean we, my brother and me) to buy my first rental property, basically we have most of the thing, good deal, good real estate agent, we are on the way to get a good PM, contractors, downpayment is ready, loan is ready, everything seems to be ready. My brother is good with numbers so the way we calculated it is 8-9% ROI, it is a duplex in Indy, nice neighborhood, everything seems to be ok. But one of the PM that we spoke about told us that from his experience relatively cheap houses ( he was saying that single family house whose rent is lower than 1000 dollars is in the category cheap) attract people with low salary, and that basically then are barely surviving, which means that if they have any serious problem in their life, child sickness, car being broken down, tooth problems, they will not be able to pay, which will lead to either slowing down of everything, or them not paying at all, or not even wanting to move out, an then he layer and just losing the money. So basically, the idea is that even though all the numbers look great, the vacancy can not be predicted because people with low salaries tent to be unstable and there for we will have a lot of days, week and hopefully not month when nobody will be living in that duplex. So what do you guys think about all of this? This is a duplex in the nice area, no crime there, maybe the only problem is that all the other properties are single houses, and that is the only duplex, and nowadays tenant are paying 1050 dollars in total, for both of the unit, but it is because the owner is their relative and they were there I guess for a long time. This price will definitely be hire after we fix it, but it will still be I guess maybe 1200 dollars altogether. So we practically already bought it, we will have the tenant leave the duplex before March the 1st, and then we will fix it, and start renting it from I guess maybe May, I guess. I will write here from time to time, so all the new people that are just starting this business can maybe learn from my mistakes and try to avoid them. :) So basically my questions are there:

1. What is your opinion about this "line" of 1000 dollars for the single family houses, is it real and should we be afraid of it?

2. What about duplex? Is there some border line there? Is our duplex too cheap so will it attracts only unstable and unreliable tenants and then that will turn a good deal into a very bad one when half of the year nobody pays the rent?

3. How to make a good selection of the future tenant, what to check, ask about their income, saving, how often do they brush their teeth? :)

I want to say thanks to all of you, wonderful people, for all the advice that you have given me, I will definitely give up on that PM. I tried to reply to each one on you on private chat but after I came back home from the classes I realize that I was banned from sending inbox messages...:) I guess it wasn't the right way to do it, I just wanted to say to each one of you thanks for all the things that you wrote me. So I can see that I have 4 messages in my inbox but I can not open it now, I wrote to the administrator and I apologize, so hopefully I will be able to go there and read it.

Andy, you are a real estate broker in Indy, maybe we can start doing this together?

Joel, you are a PM from Indy, so it is great!

If it is not a problem, maybe you guys can write on my email.

Im new into BP, I hope that I not doing something wrong again, I am just very serious about all of this, and I want to learn everything, so maybe Im just to pushy sometimes...

Hello, everyone, Im a newbie and I have a question that I wanna share with you.   Im living in Beijing, China, and I am able to save a lot of money here that I want to invest into rental properties, and since Im soooooo far away Im following the ideas of David Green, about the long distant investing, I picked up Indianapolis as a city and a region where I want to invest and I have found a local agent and a property manager , so they can , in a way, control each other, in a sense that I will have two separate source of information, because I will not be able to be there and I need to choose the right property, especially because this is my first one and Im still learning about all of this. So I found this property manager here, on BP, one of the women recommend me this person and we start communication. Now, I found that there are 3 potential problems that bothers me about him:

1. He offered me to help me with building a portfolio " I will help you build a portfolio"

2. when the agent sent me a few deals that looked pretty good to me ( I was using and following the calculator on BP and the numbers were good) my PM told me that these deals were not good, and when I asked him why he didn't reply ( at least not until this moment when Im writing this here)

3, in general I feel like we have a bad communication, he replies to my emails slow and sometimes I need to write him 2-3 emails  before he replies.

Now, I know that it is not a job of a PM to send me deals or to check them out ( or maybe it is, if he is going to be my future PM for a lot of properties shouldn't it be in his concern to know which kind of properties will he be working with), but I was wondering if maybe this is not a very good property manager, maybe he is also an agent, or maybe his wife is an agent and they are working this together so he doesn't want me to buy properties from this other agent.

Or maybe Im just being paranoid? :)

Yeah, you are totally right. I mean, I do live in Beijing, but my brother lives in SF bay area, so he is kinda closer and we are in this together, but after the video and thins that Ive read here on BP I will try to do it some other way. Thank you so much for your answer. :) 

Hello, everyone, Im Nikki and me and my brother want to start investing in the rental properties so I start communication with Morris invest and then I came here and read a lot of bad things about this company. Can you, please, tell me is there some final conclusion? I live and work in Beijing and my brother is in San Francisco, and we want to but rental properties in the mid west, far away from both of us, so I thought that having a turnkey company there, at the spot, to help us, is not a bad things to have, especially in the first few years, but then again...So what do you guys suggest that I should do, take a risk and try to buy the first property with Morris invest and see what is going to happen, or find some other way?