All Forum Posts by: Robert Matelski

A light to medium grey would look great on that house, especially with the white windows you have. Do NOT paint the brick though. It looks good as it is. It will just create more work for you to paint it, and will create ongoing work for whoever buys it.

Yeah, agree w/ Brian 100%. If you get a solid section 8 tenant, they will probably stay for-friggin-ever too, which means you won't have to deal with turnover costs and drama... plus you can get pretty decent section 8 rent increases each year. Oh, and almost nobody would call that the border of San Leandro and Oakland. It's "by the coliseum/airport". Huge difference.

Welcome to the site Rika! I have been investing in the Cleveland area for years, doing buy and hold rentals. I've gathered a ton of information on investing in the Cleveland area, and would be happy to share it if you are interested. It includes, among other things, a comprehensive map of the Cleveland area, grading each area from A+ down to F, using a consistent, objective and transparent methodology using publicly available data. Feel free to drop me a private message if you are serious about considering the Cleveland market!

Congrats Steve, that's awesome!

My goal that I am working on now is starting a real estate investing focused YouTube channel by the end of the summer! I recently launched a website focused on Cleveland area real estate investing, and I am super pumped about soon having a series of videos that will go along with it. I've been mentoring and advising people on real estate topics for quite a few years now, and I often find myself repeating lots of the same stuff over and over and over and over... so it finally hit me that I should actually record it and document it so that there would be literally no limit to the number of people I can impact =)

FHA/203k is tough at that price point, especially for multi-family. I am assuming you plan to live in one unit and rent out the other(s). I think that is a great plan, in general! But the issue will mostly be finding a property that qualifies for the financing you're able to use.

To help you on your journey I would first off say you should avoid looking at cities with tough POS requirements. The cities you tried in are known for being tough POS cities. Maple Heights, Euclid, and Shaker Heights are all cities that have very tough POS requirements. You might consider instead looking for a duplex in Garfield Heights or Cleveland proper. Garfield still does have a POS requirement but they have scaled it back and it is just exterior now (they do not even need to set foot inside). Cleveland of course has no POS at all. If you go the Cleveland route, I would recommend looking at North Collinwood (the area off of Lakeshore Blvd.) or at Old Brooklyn... those are the two neighborhoods that are the most stable and will have duplexes that would be suitable to a newbie, especially as a live-in investment. I created dashboards for each of these cities/neighborhoods... I will message you the link to that :)

Welcome to the site Jose! I have been investing in the Cleveland area for years! It is a great place to build an investment portfolio for solid cash flow. 

I've gathered a ton of information on investing in the Cleveland area, and would be happy to share the link to it if you are interested. It includes, among other things, a comprehensive map of the Cleveland area, grading each area from A+ down to F, using a consistent, objective and transparent methodology using publicly available data. Feel free to drop me a private message!

Welcome to the site Brian! I have been investing in the Cleveland area for years. I first started in the late 1990s, and that didn't go so well. I tried again though, in the aftermath of the real estate crash, and that has proven far more successful (I learned a lot from what worked the first time, and even more importantly, what did NOT work the first time).

To give you the best tips to help you get started on your investing journey, it would help us all if you would share a few more pieces of info:

1) What specific areas (suburbs, neighborhoods, etc.) have you been looking for properties, and why did you choose your area(s)?

2) Are you pre-approved for a mortgage? If not, do you plan to pay all cash for a property (with proof of funds in the form of a recent bank statement ready to roll)?

3) Is the agent that you're working with used to working with investors? (There is usually a pretty big shift in dynamic between a realtor who is used to dealing with people who are buying houses to live in vs. properties for investment).

4) What kind of response are you getting from the offers you have submitted thus far? (Are you getting counter-offers? Or are they just not even responding to your offers? Have you been "low-balling" them?)

I've gathered a ton of information on investing in the Cleveland area, and would be happy to share the link to it if you are interested. It includes, among other things, a comprehensive map of the Cleveland area, grading each area from A+ down to F, using a consistent, objective and transparent methodology using publicly available data. Feel free to drop me a private message!

If it's functional and meets the needs of the building and there is no mandate to replace it from anyone (e.g. local building dept., CMHA, your insurance co., etc.) I would probably just leave it as it is.

Welcome to the site. I have been investing in the Cleveland area for years! I've gathered a ton of information on investing in the Cleveland area, and would be happy to share the link to it if you are interested. It includes, among other things, a comprehensive map of the Cleveland area, grading each area from A+ down to F, using a consistent, objective and transparent methodology using publicly available data. Feel free to drop me a private message!

If you could not fill your units easily I am going to field a guess that your building was on Noble. Unless you're local and self-managing (and can handle all these little things yourself), all those buildings on Noble (from the EC border all the way to Mayfield Road basically) are tough to make work. You get rents that are the same as or barely higher than Cleveland proper rents, but much much higher expenses.

Cleveland Heights is a tough city for owning apartment buildings. Same with Shaker Heights. Fussy city requirements, high expenses, and shockingly low quality tenant base (compared to the surrounding SFR communities). You probably would have been fine with investing in SFRs in Cleveland Heights, or with investing in apartment buildings in a less fussy city (like Cleveland proper), or with investing in apartment buildings in a city that attracts higher quality tenants in apartments (like Lakewood or Lyndhurst).

To say you're done with the midwest because of one or two bad experiences (with buildings that were inherently not likely to be profit machines from the get go) is like saying you're never going to date again after having one bad date with someone from Tinder (whose profile screamed crazy from the get go).