All Forum Posts by: Jacob St. Martin

Hello Christopher, I am an agent/investor in that area and I would love to help! There are some fantastic opportunities in those areas for rentals with solid cash flow, and rising prices in the Charlottesville area continue to push people over the mountain to Waynesboro/Staunton and consequently have led to decent appreciation in those areas. 

I will gladly send some properties your way, will just need some more details on what you are looking for! I will send you a DM now

Hello Mike, I am a Realtor and investor based out of Charlottesville VA but I cover the Richmond area as well.

Just to clarify, it sounds like you purchased a rental with a partner and now you would like to sell and they don't want to sell? If so, do you have either the operating agreement of the entity purchased under or if under your personal names a joint venture agreement spelling out the terms of the agreement? These will usually include terms for this type of situation, like the other party either needing tot buy your share at fair market value or agree to a sale. 

If not then you are in a sticky situation, you are able to sell your share but finding a buyer is going to be incredibly hard even if the investment is fantastic. The reason is that whoever buys your share is also buying a partner that they don't know which is a huge red flag. I personally (and any wise investor) would never do this unless my share granted me full decision making power over the property, and even then I would be hesitant. If this is the situation then your best option is probably to convince your partner to sell. 

I am not surprised that you have had little luck reach out to traditional Realtors with this. Most realtors don't know even know the basics of real estate investing, and this is a tricky one. 

I would be glad to hop on a call with you at some point, talk through some details, and see if there is a way I can help out. I have a good network of investors that I send deals to, so depending on the details I might be able to help you find a buyer. At the very least, I might be able to help you come up with a strategy to convince your partner to sell and/or talk through it with them. 

Feel free to DM me if you want to talk more!

Hello Mishaal, I am a Realtor and investor in VA and I would love to help walk you through some options!

I typically wouldn't recommend the fully turn-key investments that already have property management in place, the returns are often very disappointing and it is only marginally less work than buying a place yourself and hiring a property manager. This is especially true if you have a good agent because they will be able to connect you with a good property manager, handyman, lender, etc. 

Other than books/podcasts I would recommend a few things. 

First, you want to be extremely clear on what your goals are and why you have those goals.

I see on your profile that you are a critical care physician so I will assume that you are both very busy and have a large income. A bad example of a goal for you might be, "I want to own 5 cashflowing rentals". A better goal would be "I want to eventually swap to a practice that has better work/life balance or hours but pays less, but I still want to be able to afford the same quality of life. In order to do this I would need to bring in an extra $2,500 a month without adding too much time, which I could do with 5 rentals cashflowing $500 a month". 

For market, I always recommend the one that you know the best first and to only look elsewhere if you know your market really well and are certain that the strategy you want to use won't work well there. I would be glad to help you select a market based on your goals. 

Market, capital requirements, and best strategies are going to be very dependent on your goals, income, time, etc. so I would be glad to help with those but would need more details first. 

Feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss more!

Hey Wyatt! I am a local investor and realtor and I actually got my start in real estate investing in Charlottesville by house hacking, and am in my second house hack now! It is 100% the way to go and I work with clients all the time looking to do the same thing. Not sure who told you to buy and develop land to house hack but there are a number of reasons that I think that would not be the right move in most cases:

1. Even if those developments bring a large number of jobs to the area, people normally want to live in a place with good amenities more than they want to be close to work. The amazon data center is going to be about halfway between cville and richmond so people will likely just live in one of those two localities and commute to work. 

2. I am not sure about the power plant you are referencing but the amazon data center isn't supposed to be completed for 15 YEARS... You don't want to wait 15 years for you to get the value out of a deal when you could definitely do so sooner. 

3. It takes way more time money to build. Typically, if you want to buy land and build you are going to max out at ~75% loan to cost which means you will need to front 25% of purchase and building costs, and be making debt payments while it is under construction. With a house hack you can put as little as 3.5% down (although I recommend 5%). You also need to be prepared for construction to run over budget because it often does. The cost of construction is also very high in the area right now, so it is basically always cheaper to buy a pre-existing home (even if it isn't that old) than to build a new one. 

4. It also takes at the very least 6 months to go through purchase, permitting, and building but often more like 9-12+ especially if you are doing a custom build. Meanwhile, I could get you into a house hack and help you get it rented out in under two months.

5. You will have a much harder time finding tenants outside of the city and probably wont get as much rent.

6. Believe it or not Albemarle county is worse than the city of Charlottesville when it comes to regulations and permitting. I don't have much experience with Luisa or fluvanna on the zoning/regulation side of things.

Just about the only situation in which I would recommend building into a house hack in this area is if you are very well off financially, don't need/want to move soon, are planning to build an expensive custom "forever" type home but want an ADU or something to house hack to bring in a little bit of income (but not enough to cash flow on an expensive home), can't find something on the market that fits your criteria, and don't want to be in the city.

I would be glad to connect in person to discuss things more and help you either find land or a home to house hack depending on what you decide on!

Hello Mitch, 

Congrats on your success! I would recommend looking at the return on equity in the different scenarios. Return on equity is basically taking the return on investment formula and replacing the denominator with your current equity rather than the money invested. This will show you if your money is working as hard for you as you want it to be! Then you can look at the ways to access that equity and deploy it into other deals and look at your new ROE in each scenario. It is hard to give more specific advice than that because the right answer depends on the numbers and what purchase opportunities you have. 

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! 

Okay, I have some thoughts that somewhat depend on what your goals are but this is probably how I would structure it: 

There is two road blocks that I am running into when I am thinking about everything that you want to do: First, there are loan products for everything that you want to do but they are always going to want to be in first position. If you got a loan to purchase and rehab you couldn't then go get a building loan on that same property because there is already another loan on it. Second, lenders normally don't want to do one loan for two parcels because if you go and sell off one of them there is now less collateral against the loan. If they are willing to work with you on that then ignore this part but I would just double check that they know it is two parcels. 

I think the best thing that I can think of (assuming they don't care about you having one loan on two parcels) is to purchase, rehab all the units at the same time, immediately sell off the SFH to hopefully pay off a good chunk of the loan (which is possible because it is on its own parcel) and then rent out the duplexes paying down the loan as quickly as possible, which you could accelerate by feeding in capital from an investor or another source. Once you have that paid off, you can go get a construction loan. They normally will go up to 70-75% loan to cost but can you the land/other buildings on the land as the collateral as long as the value of those is more than 25% of what you are borrowing. Then you can build those and do whatever you want with them.

There may be a better way and I would definitely look into building loan programs in your area and not take my word for it because this is what I recall from my most recent conversation with new construction lenders and I am not 100% confident. Hope this helps! It isn't a super neat solution but it is really hard to build without a good amount of liquid capital. Feel free to reach out with any other questions

What current loan structure do you have on the property? That will likely limit your options somewhat but I would be glad to think through it and help out once you provide more detail

Hello Hunter, 

Congrats on your success as a sales executive and wanting to get involved in real estate investing! I don't necessarily have content recommendations. However, my biggest piece of advice for people with situations like yours is to house hack. House hacking might require a little more creativity in NYC than other places but the fundamentals are still the same. Almost always it will be the highest ROI thing that you can do with your money. My first deal was a house hack and when you combine rent savings, appreciation, loan paydown, tax savings, and in this case even cash flow, my internal rate of return (sorta like ROI but more detailed) was almost 300% annually. Not every deal is that good, I definitely got lucky on my first one, but still house hacks almost always will give better returns than other options.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more about house hacking!

Hello Italy, 

Unfortunately there will always be risk when doing short term rentals, and things will inevitably get ruined or broken at some point. Expect that and plan for it! Airbnb does have an insurance policy in case a guest does trash a house but I will note that they are very much partial to guests and will normally not side with the host in a dispute unless you have really good evidence. There are a few things that you can do to help protect your listing, this is not exactly an exhaustive list but just a few things: 

- You can install a ring doorbell so that you have video evidence of who is coming in and out of the house. If the guests throw a party against your rules you will be able to show a bunch of people entering the house who weren't supposed to be there. 

- You can require that guests have uploaded proof of ID to airbnb in your settings. This prevents people from making a new account to throw a party, trash a house, get a bad review from the host, then just make a new account so that it doesn't matter. 

- You can require a refundable deposit/place a hold on their card just in case. I don't do this and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it but you can. 

- Have a smart lock. It is really helpful to have a log of when guests were going in and out of the house. This has helped me with airbnb disputes before

- Tell your cleaners to let you know if anything is broken or trashed and to take thorough pictures before touching anything. 

- I believe the other OTAs also have host insurance but not as robust as airbnb. 

- Send a message during the guest's stay checking in and ask how their stay is going. This gives them a chance to tell you if anything is wrong with the unit and if they do not reply or say that everything is going well, it will help you if they break stuff and/or try to get a refund later. 

- Honestly, I haven't had that much issue with people breaking things, I have had more people trying to fraudulently get a refund though. 

- Set aside a % of each host payout you get for future repairs replacing furnishings, expect it to happen, and then you will be prepared when it does. 

Feel free to reach out if you have more questions!

Hello Ethan,

I am an investor/agent in Charlottesville VA and I can confirm that college towns can be amazing! There are of course upsides and downsides to every market but I tend to find that college towns usually have solid fundamentals, companies moving to the area, population growth, etc. If you are renting to students you need to just expect them to be rougher on the house but anything close to the university in Charlottesville is usually leased up about 10 months in advance. Also in college towns there is often a segmentation of areas that are "college" and areas that are more for locals. Understanding those unofficial boundaries will help you identify who your most likely tenant base will be and cater to them.

If you have any specific questions I would be glad to answer!