All Forum Posts by: Aaron Smith

I looked at 3-4 programs and picked the one that seemed to match my strengths and personality.

I joined Land Academy this year with the launch of their "Land Academy 3.0" update. I'm fielding calls from interested sellers from my first mailer and I'm working on my second mailer now. Steven and Jill basically play the numbers game -- if you use their approach to pick a good area and price it accordingly you WILL get deals coming in. The steps are all laid out for you.

Membership also provides you with all of the tools to get lists, analyze properties, send mail, and secure funding partners. The closed discord group is very beneficial and active.

The training also shows you how to take this from a "one-man show" to a business that allows you to choose which parts you do and which parts you hire somebody else to do. I'm clearly not there yet, but the path I'll take is clear to me.

My plan is to establish this business and use the profits to invest in multi-family rentals and self-storage

@Nathan James Flesher You're right, I did misunderstand a little bit of where you're at. Nobody can predict the future of interest rates, but I believe the market is already starting to level out, so maybe the restrictions on investor loans won't cause as much change in rates as we thought. Honestly, rates are SO RIDICULOUSLY LOW right now that a .5 increase is not a big deal, anyway. My first home was financed at 7.5% fixed 30y and that was a good, competitive rate.

If you need access to that cash now, you could take that mortgage and get a HELOC in a few months if you feel the value of the home will get you enough. With rents at $1150 and a loan of $84K on a recently renovated property, you should be making a handsome profit each month.

If you can wait and you're confident enough about the appraisal, then wait. I usually opt for the sure thing now. You could pay an appraiser or a good, local agent right now to see what the value looks like. It should cost only a few hundred bucks for an appraisal and much less for an agent's assessment, but it could help you make the right decision and save thousan

@Charlie MacPherson You seem to be taking this all very personally for some unknown reason. I suspect that:

1. your business has been hurt by wholesalers.
2. you are upset that wholesalers haven't earned their stripes with a license like you have.
3. you know somebody that was ripped off by a wholesaler and you're mad about it.

You pound the table and insult others while accusing others of pounding the table and insulting you. Self-awareness is a good thing, my friend.

Wholesalers and agents serve different but valuable purposes in the market. If that weren't the case, the market would have eliminated them long ago. Some do bad business, just like some licensed agents do bad business.

Remember that we are here to learn from each other and play on the same team. Best of luck to you,

Have you considered using a different entity, like a land trust? Make sure the account name looks like something that isn't a corporate entity and it may get through. There was a BP podcast episode where they did this. I think it was the one with the foundation issue investor down south.

VA loans can take longer than conventional. Like FHA, VA loans also have requirements that conventional loans don't. It can be an inconvenience to the seller to tie up the property in escrow for 30 days only to have the deal fall through because a handrail wasn't up to the VA's standards.

Believe it or not, there are properties that agents can't or won't sell. A good wholesaler finds these properties and puts together an ethical deal. Bad wholesalers rip people off.

Let's not pretend that all real estate agents are angels, though. While they are regulated more closely, there are sketchy deals put together by sketchy agents.

Bottom line: there are dishonest people who sell homes. Some happen to have a license, others don't.

As for Jerry's latest (which I just watched), I can only assume that he's:

1. preventing future liability, making sure he can't be sued for teaching people the wrong way to wholesale.

2. just doing his part as a wholesaling trainer to keep his students/viewers out of hot water.

I suggest that you start talking to banks and credit unions. You'll never know if this is a real obstacle until you try to move forward. If you talk to 12 banks and CUs, I'm sure you'll find at least one that will do a cash-out refi, assuming that the home has enough value to meet their criteria.

The fed has signaled no rate increases for basically all of 2021. However, this doesn't change the fact that Fannie/Freddie are reducing their 2nd/investor loan portfolio. I would guess that a significant portion of the closing fees is prepaid expenses into escrow, which is really just putting money into your own pocket, but tough to know without seeing the breakdown.

If you're cashflowing $500/month on this property then in 6 months you've gotten back about half of the closing fees. It wouldn't be worth it to me to refi at that point with the 3.625% rate. Keep it, cashflow, on to the next deal. If the value increases significantly, it's easy to get a HELOC and pull out the equity that way.

I'm using a similar strategy on my primary residence and I'm very pleased with it. Before I started it, I did some searching online and discovered BP in the process. There are a few posts mentioning it with various opinions on whether it "works" or not. It works for me. Principle is going down faster, I have $0 consumer debt, I have a bigger tax write-off, and I have a LOC to draw on for investments. It's a great idea if a person has financial discipline.