All Forum Posts by: William Murrell

Nowhere near enough info to give any feedback.  Be more specific and perhaps someone can give you some guidance.  

+1 to Nick's advice.  Sometimes the area you live in just won't work for a beginner with little capital.  Maybe you need to look further out.  

Give us the details and I'm sure one of us will be interested.

Buy a house with traditional owner occupant financing (usually better terms than given to investors) and then move out and rent it.  Or better yet, buy a duplex and live in half and rent the other half.  It is an easy way to get started without a lot of money since you can sometimes get financing with little or no down payment since you'll be living there.

There are many companies that provide the service, but costs vary largely by location.  Usually there will be a per hour fee and then possibly a tonnage rate since municipal solid waste is billed for disposal by the ton.  Some might do it flat fee, but that just depends on the company.

Sold comps are public record so they won't really care where you got the data.  I'd fight it.  Come to them with a list of reasons why they're too high and make your case.  Worst case scenario: they enforce it and you're no worse off than you are now.  I know several people who have fought it and won, but I also know some people who fought and lost.  

They don't really care if you're an owner occupant.  The only parties that care whether you live there or not are the lender and your insurance company.  Depending on the loan, you usually need to have lived there for a while.  Sounds like you have that covered.  And your insurance policy needs to be for a rental.  I'm sure you've done that already.  

As for "staying off their radar" they already have you squarely on their radar because your mailing address is not the same as the property.  That is a dead giveaway that you don't live there and are renting it out.

To answer the basic question, yes there is definitely a max dollar amount in a given market past which the house will not cash flow after expenses.  Sometimes they will if you pay cash, thereby removing debt service from the equation.  But not using leverage lowers your return.  You'll have to analyze a lot of deals usually before you find one that works but just keep at it.

My personal vote is to keep the job for a while.  It's a lot easier to get financing when you have stable employment and you can always fall back on the job if you try and decide full time investing is not for you.  And if you're flipping, it might end up that you have large spans of time between deals where you don't have money coming in to live off of. Just my $0.02

Welcome to the area and to BP!

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