All Forum Posts by: Pat G.

Sounds like MI weather, rain one day and snow the next. Oh well. only 6 more months till spring.

JK

@Anna M. Well we were all newbies at one time or another. You are very welcome. Do you have snow out in Denver Yet? Love that part of the US. Have  good one.

@Kyle Mitchell All good advise. If you underwrite the deal correctly and not get into the hype from the selling broker (sorry for that brokers) you should be alright. Example the only value add can't be raise rents. At some point that will not work anymore. Stick to your rules of thumb, like a DCR of 1.25 or higher. This is where your team in important show your numbers to your PM, your lawyer, and banker and see what they say. There are a lot of listings out there that just don't make sense and bringing more down payment to the table to make it work is not a sound way of doing business.
As far as you question on a crash, if it does happen and you follow good rules of thumb, you can and will make a killing.

@Bab Adetiba For your post it sounds like the current property is SFH? I would see if you can wholesale that property and get out as lite as you can. I have not been in this particular situation, but close. When I looked back I learned that I didn't do any due diligence on the area, or surrounding areas or even listen to my gut- I lost $. Your gut will never let you down. The times I didn't listen and due the research first I lost over $150,000. No More. For either SFH or Multi-family I would set a floor on population at like 25,000+ so you don't run into what you did. And never invest in a area where the population is declining. Hope that helps. Good Luck.

@Douglas Vogel Thank You for serving! First I would pin point exactly what type of apartments you want, 5-28, 24-150, etc. 2. Visit sites like http://www.best-cities.org/ and figure out what states then cities you are going to target. 3. Either call the city and ask for a list of apartments or buy a list from a list broker, or what I did go to www.apartments.com and create your list. 4. Set up Pat Live - www.patlive.com to handle your calls 24-7 from your mailers and only call back the cream of the crop. 5. Take your list of prospects and upload it into a mail house like vistaprint.com and have them print, label and mail the letters/postcards for you. 
The biggest thing is get laser focused on what you are looking for, i.e. I am looking for 24-150 units in C+ to B areas constructed after 1982 to 2008 in X, Y, Z states. So if you get a call that doesn't match that you know to throw it away and take it off your mailing list.  I hope that helps and is somewhat clear. 

@Ike Ekeh All good info. Rule of thumb is Repairs and Maintenance is at least 10% of Gross income - more if you see it needs it and CapEx $150 per unit. Again, depends on like everyone as already stated above. But that should help to start your number running.

@Spencer Gibson I talked with a CoStar rep just this week. I was looking to use it for one thing only obtain owner contact information so I could call and ask if they want to sell, that's all. I didn't want the comps or sales data at this point and he stated each state is broken into sections, and each section costs more money. Like he quoted me Atlanta, GA had 1,552 buildings in my search needs, but it would cost me like $10K at year. Seeing that I am only looking to pull this data one time, it didn't make financial sense to pay it. All posters are correct it is a pay up front for the whole year no monthly deal. You just have to figure out what you are looking at doing with the data to justify the cost. I teamed up with a local investor/broker and he pulled the report I was needing. Now, if I get a deal I can ask him to participate with me to make the deal happen. P.S. I know that he is a owner of multi-family already. 

I did get the report and he does have owner names with phone numbers, I am having my assistant call this week on them so I will tell you how good the info is. Hey it is better than nothing. 

@Syed Naqvi Great question. One thing Multi-family begins at 5 units and up. I wold start your research at http://www.best-cities.org/ and then go from there. Hope that helps.

What are You Going To Choose?

@Taylor Witt How did your list building and mailing go? I ran into the same problem with ListData so I built my own list by calling the counties I wanted to mail to and talking to the tax department and asking for the IT department where I talk to a tech who maintains the online databases. Hope that helps and let us know progress.