All Forum Posts by: Roger Lin

Robin,

You are in a great position. Does your home make a good rental property? Will it give you good income and is it in a good condition and in a good school district that people want to live in? If it is a good rental too. You can refinance to take some cash out of it and use the proceeds to buy yourself a smaller home to live in.

The larger home will probably bring you a higher rental income, higher loan amount. Also, this way, you only have one purchase transaction, your smaller dwelling.

Finally, once you turn your larger home into an investment property, you can 1031 exchange it into a larger investment property (deferring capital gains tax) and keep doing it until you are tired of investing, then move into that last property, live there for two years as your primary residence. Sell it without paying capital gains (if your profit is less than $500K).

You will come a full circle and avoided a lifetime of capital gains.

Roger

I have a listing for a very nice office condo (926 SF) in the Manassas, VA submarket for $124,900. They owners have two more units on each side of this one. The units are internally connected.

They are willing to sell all three if someone is interested.

So, this is an opportunity to own about 3,000 SF of very nice office space. Owner willing to sign a renewable one year lease on at least one unit (Instant cash flow).

Rents are about $11 NNN or $17.5 FS.

CAP Rate: 7.5%

Contact me if you have any questions.

Thanks!

Roger

Yes, there are definitely properties for sale not on CoStar or LoopNet. I currently have a couple that I put feelers out to various brokers and end users. If a buyer is a "closer", I always bring deals in front of those guys first.

I also know a very successful broker who does his business "old school" and never touches the internet. Instead, everything is word of mouth. It's goot to know people like that when you are looking for something for an investor or if you are looking to invest.

With that said, most of the deals will get on CoStar. Loopnet was bought by CoStar a few years back. I was told by CoStart rep that everything on Loopnet is on CoStar (I haven't tried to confirm that yet.) It's definitely true that not everything on CoStar is on Loopnet though. CoStar is only available to brokers and Loopnet is available to the general public.

A lot of people make money the first couple of time in real estate because of dumb luck. I did. I am glad you are venturing into multifamily. Even though it isn't rocket science, it has a few more layers of complexity than SFHs.

In order to figure out whether this property will cash flow positively for you, you will need to do what I call the "setup". It's essentially a back of the envelope analysis of the cash flows in and out of the property in year one. You might want to start with unlevered cash flow, meaning, see if it works without financing first.

I would start with your Potential Gross Income (PGI), take out Vacancy (say 8-13% if you don't know), then you have your EGI (Effective gross income). Using EGI, take out any operating expenses you have (i.e. maintenance, taxes, insurance, trash...), then you have your NOI (Net Operating Income).

If this number is positive, you are cash flowing positively. If not, you are sucking wind. Use this number (if it is positive) divide it by the purchase price than you have your Cap Rate.

Hope this helps.

Roger

Welcome. Good luck and I hope you work with you some day.

Roger Lin

Valerie,

Please contact me privately at [email protected]

Roger Lin

Hi!

My name is Roger Lin I am a fellow DMV investor. I just joined BP tonight. Would love to be part of the Meetup group.

Roger

Hi Everyone,

My name is Roger Lin and I live in Fairfax County, VA. I am a new member of BP and hope to be able to contribute as well as benefit from all the exchanges of ideas and experiences here.

I started out in real estate during the "go-go years" of 2004-2006 working as a real estate attorney in the D.C. region doing title work for residential purchases and refinances. I met some investors working as a real estate attorney and they piqued my interest in investing in real estate.

In 2007 I started a small real estate investment company for my family, which I still run. We started by hard money lending on rehab projects and owning rental properties. This led me to actually rehab properties and build new construction homes. The construction work eventually led to a passion in building science and high performance green building approaches (passivhaus, zero-net-energy). In the back of my mind, I always wanted to scale my work to commercial real estate. One year ago, I decided to get more education and enrolled in the M.S. in Real Estate Development at George Mason University.

Today, I am a student, I own and manage a few SFH rental units, I originate the occasional hard money loan and I build high performance homes. My new focus is at Weber Rector Commercial Real Estate Services, where I work as a commercial real estate agent to really understand commercial real estate. My goal there is to expand the footprint of the company into other parts of Northern VA.

I seek to learn from those of you much more experienced than I am and hope to add value to discussions and perhaps meet friends who share similar passions in real estate.