All Forum Posts by: Shuvrajit Mukherjee

Did you try chatgpt? It's pretty accurate with such calculations, and will immediately point out if you're missing any datapoints. In this case specifically, I think you would need to enter the rental estimate to calculate tge return right? 🤔

I would not have external help on this. This is the core. Either you learn to be good at it, or partner(your business partner, not someone who works on commission/salary/fees) with someone who is good at it. 

Getting a contractor who is not hell bent on ripping off an out of state investor 

I would lean on AI tools like chatgpt or grok. These are very good with details. You can tweak the answers given by it, like remove pm if you're not using pm etc, or change interest rate. But I have been trying these recently, and it's very very good at capturing expenses that we as human are likely to miss.

if you have specific property in mind, you can also try sparrowlane, this pulls in CMA and rental estimates, so that you don't have to go to different platforms for data

I created an app that could help. You can create separate folders and put the notes you have taken during the inspection/walkthrough. If you're unsure of any data, AI will take the best guess of industry standard for that particular repair. Then you can just go to the chat, and analyze the deal, it can even pull CMA and rental estimates, count in the repairs and get you cash-on-cash or cap rate or whatever metrics you need. If you don't have contact for contractor, you can even ask the app to contact a few, and get a quote for you.
I would love for you to try out, it free.

And the best part is, I am the developer, you can directly ask me to incorporate any features that can be useful.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sparrowlane/id6741719361

I'm an out of state investor. My opinion varies based on my experience, and keeping a property manager has been a nightmare for me. I am doing much better in the properties where I have no pm, and the process is almost automated, using baselane to collect rent, good tenants, and few serviceman.

If the tenants is not good, pms won't help either, not sure why I kept pms in the first place.

Are you out of state? I used to invest in Cleveland, and I can only share horror stories. While I couldn't find a good contractor, I can definitely say which ones to avoid 😅 The contractors were the main reason that I had to stop investing. 

I used to live in Bellevue, when I started investing in Cleveland area, I also went for BRRRR, I was a newbie, and it was hard to pull off. I can share my learnings, so that you are aware of what to avoid, specially when you are out of state. I wish you great success.

Now I have moved to Chicago, and moved my focus from investing in property to building softwares for investors. I'm sure you will need tools to find deals (eg price/sqft etc), estimate rents, calculate cash-on-cash returns, cap rate etc. I put them all in a chat interface, and calculate using AI so one doesn't need to juggle between different platforms. It's free. If you would like to try out I can share the link.

Yeah AI is increasingly being effective. Even in ChatGPT, you can ask about a property and it will pull in latest data, then you can ask to do any kind of analysis on top. It's way more flexible than other other tools, cause you can explain in plaintext what's your strategy, and it will fill in pretty accurate estimates. I was very pleasantly surprised.

I also built a tool myself, I had a lot of issues finding service person for different repairs need. I had to call multiple businesses looking up google reviews, check availability, get quotes then schedule. It used to easily take 2hrs when I didn't have a trusted contact. 
I built an AI Agent that does this, searches google, contacts the vendors, gets availability, gets quotes, handle all back and forth communication, then gets back to me with suggestions, price, reviews and summary of the conversation.

So yeah, I am super pumped by AI's application in the field 

- Get property details from address. Basically when we click on a specific property, all the details we get in the page.
- Get a list of active properties in a zipcode with filters (number of bedrooms, bathrooms, price etc)