All Forum Posts by: Rachel Mellies

First off, has anyone heard of circle city investments? Curious if they’re legit since they reached out to me on social media about managing my property. They claim to rent your property under a long term lease and then they source it out as an Airbnb and manage it all completely and take the profit and we just get the rent. Which seems good for us since we are newbies and not sure if our property would do well as an Airbnb so it would be a less scary way to try that out since we’d at least be getting the rent paid. 
Second question, is that actually a legit thing? If so, are they’re any other companies in the indianapolis area you would recommend, so we could look at all the options? 

Quote from @Theresa Harris:

I've not done rent to own, but if you are thinking of selling it; I'd just sell it and be done with it. You don't have to worry about payments from the tenant.

That is what I’m thinking but I just worry my house will sit forever for sale whereas I know there’s tons of people needing to rent (cause they can’t afford to buy with how high prices are) and they’d love the option to rent to own to help them one day own a home. And they’d take better care of it if they knew it was going to be their home. However I definitely worry about prices dropping and if my home doesn’t get appraised for what our original plan was to sell it and what our contract stated then they’d likely back out even if it meant losing their fees to break the contract. And then we’d be back to square 1 trying to sell but at a lower price which would suck. If we were keeping it for a long term rental that would be different cause we could ride out the waves. But I just worry where we’d want to sell in a couple years to avoid capital gains tax that could be problematic. 
maybe it is best to just sell it even if it sits on the market a while. But that would be tough since we’d have 2 mortgages to pay. 

Quote from @Taylor L.:

What area?

Northern Utah 

We are planning to move later this winter and planned to list our house for sale in the spring but also open to renting to own.  We would be selling within 3 yrs to avoid capital gains tax. Problem is our state in recent years went insane with the market to skyrocketing prices, it topped out and is now dropping between interest rates and unaffordable housing it’s getting harder for people to sell. 

Looking for advice on which would be best in your opinion. I’ve never done a rent to own and still learning what it involves. 

Pros to sell: we have a lot of equity in our home and it would free up our finances and some debt we have in other investment properties. also wouldn’t have to worry about upcoming big maintenance needs our house could need (like a new roof). 

Pros for rent to own: easier option for getting our new loan since we’ll have a signed lease (we do not want to move twice so we plan to buy before we sell). Be able to lock in a selling point (so I read) and have buyer in the works instead of having it for sale for possibly many months losing money. No realtor so we save a lot of those fees. 

Does anyone have good resources for learning all about STR's (especially Airbnb)? We're buying our first rental property and planned to rent it out but we really think with its location and home style it would make a great Airbnb (even if we don't do that now, we'd like to eventually). But we don't know much about that side of things. Would love to soak in all the education we can get.

I’m trying to find accurate data resources for rent prices, home values, property taxes, schools…etc 

There seems to be a lot of variance between the ones I’m using and don’t know which to trust. 
I’ve been using Zillow, Trulia, bigger pockets tools. 
I was using greatschool.org till I looked up my hometown (one of the nicer areas in my whole state) and it said the schools are below average and I definitely wouldn’t say that. So now I don't know if I should trust that resource either. 
I’d love to hear what you all use for your data references! 

I know it looks that way. But as I said everything else that’s great about each company, they are pretty much the same in how the run things. These are their differences. So what I’m asking is provided you like everything else you see with both companies (which I do very much) and they are very similar in every other way but here’s where they differ, which would be better? 

they are both highly rated on google (from tenants and landlords) and company 1 is on here, bigger pockets with good ratings too