All Forum Posts by: Sol Dubnov

;) My wife has the interesting profile. I'm just there to help. I will definitely let her know your advice.

Thanks Mindy, will do. Is there a specific place in the marketplace for offering new development projects? I would to look at what others are offering there so I can see if anything there is similar to what we are thinking of.

Hi, my wife and I are looking to connect with people for a potential project. I would like to post a description of the project, but I'm not sure what is the best forum for it - investment, developers, syndication? I'd appreciate any advice on that.

Thanks God the tenant left already, so the only remaining issue is his deposit. I'd rather simply to deduce it from the deposit rather sue him, but as this is damage deposit, I'm not sure I can do that.

I had also to call a cleaning company to take care of his mess and dog poop all over the place, but since this was done technically while he was still under contract, he refuses to pay it either. Can I deduct at least this expense?

Hi,

Our tenant refused to pay a rent increase that was specified in the contract, so we asked him to leave. The whole ordeal took several months so he accrued a debt of couple $100. There was no rent control or any other reason for the tenant not to pay the new rent, but he claims that once we accepted a check for a partial amount, he is under no obligation to pay the missing amount. Is it true? Can I deduct the missing pay from his security deposit? Can I report this to a credit bureau?

thanks,

Sol

Thanks Dion. The person I was talking to was a broker who claimed to be working with Wells Fargo actually. May be I should go and talk to them directly. Our main hurdle is the cash reserves. We did not anticipate to need that, or actually had to spend them on the permits, since another bank we talked to (US Bank) said they would not consider the loan before we actually pulled the permits had a final set of plans with GC bid linked to it.
So any creative thought about handling this would be appreciated.

Thanks to all who take the time to answer. Here is our situation: we own a primary residence on which we own a mortgage and we've recently made a cash purchase of a lot from a foreclosure in a highly desirable area. We plan to build a house on that lot and move there, and rent out our current residence for extra income.

We are currently in the final stages of pulling permits from the city and have a couple of attractive bids from contractors. The final estimated value of the new house is good so it seems as a sweet deal. The problem is that we have spent pretty much all of our resources on the purchase, the plans and permits. Now when we are trying to get a construction loan, things get complicated.

When we approached the lenders, one of the lenders claimed that we need, in addition to the lot as a collateral, to have additional 25% of the construction costs in cash reserves. Another issue that came up was the payback capability - for some reason the lender said that we need to have enough income to pay back both the future payments on the new house AND the mortgage payments on our current residence, which we plan to rent out. If we have to count for both, this is more then what our current income allows at this point.

An advice that the lender gave us was to move out of our current home and rent it, so it shows as income, and only then apply for a loan. Money-wise this is not a smart move, not only because of the hassle of moving to a temporary place, but also since the rent we would pay in another place would be more then the mortgage payment we currently have. So it does not seem to make sense.

Another option is to sell our house, but even if we do that, after paying off the mortgage balance, the remaining equity will not be enough for completing the construction. I presume it will solve the cash reserves issue, but I'm not sure this is the right move as well. We were hoping that the future income from renting out our current house could be counted for in terms of the payback capabilities, but now we are not sure anymore. Or are we talking to a wrong lender?

thanks,
Sol

Thanks for the info. If indeed the option is schedule A, how can I carry it over to the future? Schedula A runs up to $2K while we spent on various development plans, soil testing and appraisals closer to $10K. Is the rest of this money simply gone?

We tried to purchase a property and paid money for an appraisal, but did not get approved and did not buy it. Then we also tried to get a construction loan for a house we are planning and paid the bank for another appraisal, but the loan was eventually denied. Can these expenses be deducted from profits we have from other rental properties we own? Since these losses are not directly tied to income generating properties I'm not sure how that works.

thanks,
Sol

We purchased a rental property and had to invest major amounts into repairs. The cost of the work is expected to exceed the projected rent income for this and may be couple more years, and we were hoping to recover the costs ASAP from the future income.

My question is whether we can report the repairs as losses and deduct them from income, or will it be considered as improvement, in which case it can be only deducted from tax when we sell the property?

Since we intend to hold on to the property, and we used up our savings on this remodeling and took some credit card loans and other debt, we really need to find a way to maximize our short term returns...

thanks for your advice
Sol