All Forum Posts by: Shaun R.

 Thanks for the offer Tarik, but I'll be at work until late this evening. 

I've been checking out some of the national hard money lender websites, and all of them have asked about property specifics when you click apply.  I just finished my first deal.  I bought a foreclosure, made repairs, and rented it.  Now that I have a tenant in place, I want to move on to my next deal and do a fix and flip.  The problem is that I don't have a specific property in mind yet.  I haven't even looked very hard because I'm not sure if I could get the financing. 

Most everything I've seen on hard money indicates that hard money lenders don't care about your credit or personal finances, only the deal.  What I want to know, are there any out there that do care?  I have a good income and a good credit score.  I have a partner that has the same.  Are there any lenders that will take those things into account when experience is lacking?  We haven't done a fix and flip yet, but we have the income to show that we could easily make payments and come up with money if a project happened to go over the timeline or budget.

I would feel better about spending some marketing money and really looking hard for good fix and flip properties if I knew I had the money lined up.  Are there lenders that will make loans on these types of deals and pre-qualify a borrower based on income and credit score?

Thanks everyone for the kind words.  The next step for me is to continue to work on my personal finances and locate a hard money lender for my next property.  

The only research I did regarding renting it was I kept an eye on what other similar properties were asking for rent.  I watch craigslist, realtor, and zillow long enough to see that, up to a certain size, everything was basically listed for $1 per square foot per month.  This house was 1510 square feet, so I asked $1500 per month.  I was nervous that I was asking too much, and that no one would pay that much for rent.  But my fears turned out to be for nothing.

I knew what the monthly payment would be, I had a decent idea of what the repairs would be from the pictures in the listing, and I had an idea of what it could rent for.  Even though it wasn't required, I paid for a home inspection to see if there was anything hidden that would drive repair costs higher than I was expecting, but the inspection came back better than expected.  

I believe I actually got the idea to make an offer on the house, and only go look at it after the offer was accept from @Brandon Turner.  It worked out this time.  

 I say not a homerun compared to some of the big deals that I read about on the site and hear about on the podcasts.  I'm happy with it.  I'd take these one after another if I can.

I had been watching MLS properties for a little while, foreclosure specifically. I knew this marked this particular one as a favorite on realtor.com and got updates everything the price dropped. After the price had dropped $15,000 I figured it was a decent deal and put in an offer without even visiting the property.

 This one happened to be very close to where I live. Maybe a 5 minute drive only because there is no direct road and I have to drive around. It's a subdivision directly behind mine. 

 James, I really feel like I had enough base education a long, long time ago.  I've devoured books, podcasts, blogs and message boards for years. I just always had some excuse not to take action. Whether it was paying all my debt off, increasing my credit score, saving more money, kids on the way, starting a new job, etc... I think getting a partner involved and having that accountability to get things done finally helped get me moving. Also, knowing that if something went wrong and we ended up taking a loss, I'd have someone to help ease the blow by splitting the money took a little stress out of the situation.  

I was trying to make the house as nice as possible because I was really scared that no one was going to rent it, and it would just sit while we made payments.  However, there were some things that I didn't even get to do because we got such a good response from the ads, and people were ready to move in.  

I'd gotten a quote from the guys that did my floors and fence to do a much longer list.  They quoted me a little over $13,000 for everything.  We ended up only having them doing the floors and fence for $3,900, which only covered labor.  Then we added more items to the scope of work as we went.  I believe we ended up saving $5k - $7k by doing lots of the work ourselves, which would have eaten into our rather slim profit.  

On this one I made a Facebook post asking for references for different trades.  I was trying to get an extensive list of people to call for any problem that could arise in the house.  I was contacted by a guy I went to high school with who has a maintenance business with his brother.  I ended up having them install the flooring and new fence, and they are on board to take care of any problems that the tenant calls with.