All Forum Posts by: Stephen Lee

Thank you all for your responses! However, I want to make it clear that I am not trying to profit on this rental. I have rentals and flips in Baltimore, where I do all of my business right now. This would strictly be an "investment" so that I have a place to vacation that I would be able to write off completely. I would consider doing this in the United States, but I see a couple of benefits of going further south into Mexico or the Carribean. The property would be cheaper than it would be in the US, and would be able to be rented 52 weeks of the year. Everywhere in the US has a fairly distinct offseason other than Southern California but the prices are too high.

@Paul Sandhu

@Paul Sandhu yes this makes sense. Same reason that I don't buy in the war-zones of Baltimore. It would be a very stable area of a highly tourism based part of town. So I'm not too concerned about getting strung up to the balcony of my property lol. But I do agree, this is not money that I am going to be dependant on holding on to. This just some money on the side.

@Julie McCoy I would have a property manager take care of all of this or buy in a condo where they have this service available (that's one of the questions that I hope will be answered in this post). Local regs and rules (i.e. ability to get a mortgage as an out of towner if I wanted to do that as opposed to buying cash), rental rates, pricing (of management and the property itself), and the stability of the country's tourism economy are the 4 factors that will determine where I eventually decide to go. Again, I don't care how it cuts into profits as long as it's not too deep into the red where it would make more sense for me to rent someone else's house and not have the write off whenever I wanted to go on vacation. AND if I were to get sick of the place and not want to go back all of the time, the goal would just be that it breaks even or cash flows a little. I'm not planning on making a living off of this rental. Just something to mess around with and try out.

@Luke Carl that makes sense. Again this would just be kind of a trial run. It's not like money I've been saving for years and years and I'm planning on doing this with it to get rich. This would just be kind of a test to see how it goes. Puerto Rico seems a little too sketchy for me right now but I was considering it before the hurricane just because of the relationship with the US I figured there may be similarities in laws and what-not. That arrises another issue of weather which is why I've looked a lot at the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao) which are fairly hurricane proof.

Looking to talk with someone who does/has done vacation rentals abroad. Ideally in the Carribean, Mexico, Central or (northern) South America. One of my tentative goals for 2018 is to buy a vacation rental abroad (single family home or condo) and rent it out using airbnb and/or vsbo. I'm not looking to get rich off of it but ideally just break even or make a little bit of money and have the ability to write off a nice vacation to the beach a couple of times per year. it's just a very daunting task not knowing the laws of the country I'm looking to invest in as well as I know them locally. this will also be my first vacation rental as well as my first investment out of the county. if anyone has any quick tips or areas they'd suggest, let me know! Thanks!

@Brendan Henry-Lambert yeah there are some good ones too for sure. I've been doing rehabs for about 2 and a half years, rentals for about a year now. do you flip/rent in the Baltimore area?

@Brendan Henry-Lambert off market is the best place with the amount of people "investing" in real estate now. Good wholesalers are a huge asset, most wholesalers are a huge liability and waste of time. But I've bought about half of mine in the past 6 months from wholesalers with mostly good, one bad, experiences. I just dropped some money to send out a mailing campaign. 

@Cynthia Wright you have to figure out a way to bring value to the person you want to take to lunch. The way I feel (and what I've heard from others) is when someone offers to take me to lunch to talk about real estate, it is usually not appealing because it's not worth taking an hour or more away from my work to save $5-$10 on lunch. There's a gold mine of knowledge in the area. Try meetups like Mark Owens' free lunches in baltimore on Fridays. The key is to provide value, which is why a lot of the big players will offer coaching, because what you pay them is the value you provide. If you don't want to have to pay for their time, you have to figure out another way to add value to that person's life/business

@Tracy Z. Rewey can you add me to your buyers list for notes in Maryland? thanks! 

hey @Calvin Douglass! Welcome to the community. Just a suggestion with everything being so new, I would have your own LLC, and then have your LLC partner up with the LLC's owned by the people on your team. As the investing landscape shifts and as you gain experience, it's more than likely that there will be at least some slight disagreements with the direction you want to head. It could be on the first property or the 100th, but there will eventually be some sort of difference in opinions. That could be as big as you wanting to scale up buying and one of your partners wanting to dial it back, or as small as you wanting to invest in a certain area and one of your partners preferring a different area. With separate entities that JV together on projects of mutual interest, if you like a property that your partners don't, you can always buy it yourself under your entity or with just one of your partners that also had interest. Or if you ever want to cut back on buying, you can sit a project or two out while the others take it on and then jump back in with them on the next one. Just my advice that I think could protect all of you in the future.

@Jeremy Payne I second everything that Ned mentioned. Mark's lunches (and coaching), the Hard Money Bankers meetup, and the Anne Arundel County meetup all have some big players in attendance and some great content. The old Hard Money Bankers meetups are on youtube too. A ton of good stuff on there.

@Chris Seveney add me to your buyers list for Maryland notes. I have yet to make the move on one yet but have done a little research. I learn better by doing so I'll probably pick one up with some free cash soon to give it a try. PM me if you need any more info from me. Thanks!

@Ken Nyczaj welcome to the community! nice to see some more youth investing in the Baltimore area. I'm from howard county but I have a lot of contacts in Annapolis/Anne Arundel. We've built a nice little community of younger investors in the area. Feel free to reach out if you need anything