All Forum Posts by: Robert Leonard

Welcome to BP @Ryan Chenevert !

I'm an investor, who will wholesale a property that doesn't fit my holding criteria or may be in excess of my capacity to rehab at the time.  I have a couple available now.  I'd be interested in hearing about your criteria for what you are looking for?

Feel free to reach out to me here or call me.  Talk to you soon.

6PM. You can get all of the details and notice of future meetings at www.meetup.com/bpacadiana

Welcome to BP @Tim Benson!  This is a great place to make connections and learn.  We have a meetup group that meets this coming Monday at the South Regional Library.  I'll be out of town next week. so it will be a rare miss for me, but I'll catch you there next month or around town.

See you soon!

Whether you own in your name or in an entity are determining factors along with your other forms of income. Your tax advisor will know your personal financial picture well enough to give you a definitive answer of what to expect. In most cases, a small amount of taxes are due each year after expenses and cost recovery (depreciation) deductions. Early principal payments do not reduce taxes owed periodically (annually or quarterly).

Oops! Sorry @Dawn Anastasi I missed that or forgot about it, because now that you mention it - I think I saw that one. 

I'll do a search before I start new threads in the future. :-)

"Very interested in the house and price is fine but will need patience from you during rough patches with delinquent rent payments."

You can't make this stuff up!  Care to share any good ones you've seen or heard?

Welcome to BP! Look up "The RING/Baton Rouge REIA" (you can find it at meetup.com) as a great place to make some connections with local investors in the Baton Rouge market.

Don't know if the supplier is available in your area, but I will only buy Surplus Wharehouse cabinets or some from Lowes.  I use these because the boxes are made of plywood.  All that I've ever seen at HD are made of particle or fiberboard.  If a product can't get wet, I don't use it in my properties no matter where it's installed.

Durability is extremely important to me.  I like to do things right once and not mess with it again.

"It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes." - Warren Buffett 

There's a whole lot to know. Too much to try to tell you in a brief post, but my advice to new investors about when they are ready to invest is simple.  When you know a good deal when you see one, you are ready to start. How do you know a good deal when you see one?  By knowing your market (whatever market you invest in if not local).

There's a ton of money spent marketing real estate and you can learn a lot from it.  The more you look at what's for sale and pay attention to the size, features and amenities of the properties and you will start to get an understanding of what's a "normal price" for a property in a given area.  When you start to notice "that's a high (or low) price" for a property in that area, that's when you start to know your market.

I did this with newspapers, but there's a slick way to do this with today's technology using the realtor.com app.  If you use the app, you can just click on "For Sale" on the main screen and all "Active" listings around you will show up in the palm of your hand!  Use the "scout" option at the bottom of the screen and it will show you listings and their prices as you drive around!  It is only active listings, so if there's a sale pending it won't show up and there's no sold data there either.  Still very useful information IMO. 

One other point about knowing your market and I'll stop before this becomes a book.  Look for value boundaries.  Look at where prices change from one area to another.  Before long you will get an understanding of why the automated valuation models (like Zestimate) are often so inaccurate.  A house 5-6 streets away might be a better comparable than one on the other side of the street if that particular street is a value boundary.  These types of things are psychological and matters of local knowledge and that's kind of hard to program into an algorithym.

In the long run, real estate investing is very forgiving of mistakes you make as you learn.  I think rule number one is, "make your money when you buy." 

Nice to connect with you @Grant Vidrine.  If you are interested in tax lien investing, I can tell you about a meetup that's happening tomorrow night in Lafayette, LA on that topic?

Your background and connections in the trades will serve you well as an investor!