All Forum Posts by: Ronald Allen Barney

Not knowing the address it's hard to know for sure but $1625 seems low for a 3/2.5 in Jacksonville, most areas I'm familiar with.  And I'm assuming "lived there" is past tense, as in you're not house hacking there.

One way to get an idea of where rent should be is Rentometer or BP's rental estimator, and to cross check that you can go to various RE sites and map rentals and compare rent prices in your area.  I suspect what you're facing here is too low of a rent but that's gut speculation, not math.

If the rent proves out to be right for your area and the cash flow is still as light as what you describe, in a market like this selling would bring on significant equity capital for a more carefully planned deal. If you find rent is low, raise it for the next lease cycle, HELOC, and get what you can with the resulting cash.

Lawyer is key. Land use, zoning, and permits are notoriously strict in California, so having a big dream of what to do with big land may be kiboshed by zoning or ordinances. Then utilities as mentioned, and then analyze your business case for what you want to do. After capital costs and ongoing expenses, what will be the ROI?

It's called "debt reshuffling" or student loan cash-out refinance.  

You’ll need to meet the following conditions to qualify for a student loan cash-out refinance:

• At least one student loan will be paid off in the process – partial payoffs are not accepted
• You have a minimum 80% loan-to-value ratio in your home
• You’ll receive a maximum of $2,000 back once the loan is paid off

I know Quicken does these and there are a number of blogs and sites that have FAQs about them, but haven't seen any other mortgage brokers that mention them.  Finding one may be a challenge as stated by others.

It was about 1750 names and included email addresses for an email campaign as well.  directmail dot com is apparently a scam (20% of the email addresses were garbage too)

Miscalculated the stamps.  $11 for a book of 20, 50 books was my give up point (writer's cramp at 1000 hand written "golden" letters), so $550 on stamps.  

 I'm out of capital.  Nobody told me you had to be Warren F'in Buffet to get into this business.

House hack with minimum cash down, then re-evaluate the cash position for additional doors.  One at a time, minimal cash, re-evaluate the position for the next one.  If the cash is light for the next deal, build up more.

Much will depend on the nature of the repaired roof.  If it was all new materials of better reliability than what leaked there probably won't be much of an insurance impact for you.  If the repair was spot repair using the same materials as the rest of the roof, actuaries will get cold feet and push for limitations on coverage, increase of rates, etc.  That doesn't mean those limits and dings will materialize (because for the insurance company there's also a sales angle to consider), but it emerges as more of a risk.

SOI is gigantic in the RE business and so is $$ investment.  I had underestimated how much of both I would need starting out, and TBH had I known I probably would have avoided going this route.  It is supremely difficult to get any traction on a shoestring budget because all the success stories sound like "well we dropped $7k in this marketing campaign and $7k in that other marketing campaign and after spending about $750k total we made over two million last year."  Dude.  And for those of us starting slim we get told "just call the people you know."  I know 15 people in this state and 12 of them wouldn't pick up the phone if I called (ex, former co-workers).  It's a grind and my savings is on vapors.  I love the business, I love selling, I love working with people, but I just didn't get into this racket with enough startup capital.  Nobody warned me about that.

But if you DO have the capital you might have a totally different experience. You'll be able to afford real marketing campaigns, lead gen services, etc., to where you can really get some ROI going.

The current price got inquiries so I wouldn't lower it.  I would experiment with raising it at least to halfway between current rent and comparable rents in the area for the same beds and baths, amenities, condition, etc.  It's easier to lower the price of an advertisement than to raise rent mid-lease.

The value an investor needs in the market is deal-finding.  If you are fantastic at finding your own deals, well there you are, you're set.  If you can find more deals than you have capital to invest in you can sell those leads to other investors, or wholesale.  Power to you, young Jedi.

MLS searching is indeed basic level and can be a product of laziness or just not wanting to invest time in a situation experience has told the agent is a huge longshot for any hope of commission. That's the mainstream.

I my case I take MLS data for sales listings and rental data, dump them out into a CSV file, load the CSV files into a database, do some data cleanup (because data quality in the MLS is not great), and then run what I call the "magic query": on one side of the match I take an average rental price for a given subdivision, a given bedrooms and bathrooms, and if the subdivision is "metes & bounds" I pull the average from MLS-wide (can require some spot checking in those cases). I then match that data by subdivision with the subdivisions for houses for sale, and then let the query crunch the numbers, rent to sale price ("1% rule"), default estimate of expenses, default estimate of rehab driven by year built, a typical mortgage amortization, and 20% down cash on cash return. That query can be tweaked for other scenarios like 5% conventional or 3.5% FHA, cash deals, hard money combo, etc. The resulting list I consider to be intellectual property. It's on offer for free for contracted clients or those I have done business with in the past. For people who want free info, go fish. Hold up a sign saying "will not work for deals" and stand by the road intersection.

Not a veteran, but in my experience so far social media has been more effective for me than any other expenditure of time and money.  BP here leads the way.  Someone else on BP has promised me that direct mail can be even better but waiting to see his numbers on that.