All Forum Posts by: William Huston

I normally check my email with my custom list daily to see if there are any deals to go look at and make offers on, but i have noticed a lot of properties are gone all sudden and the amount of properties showing up on my list is down like 50% compared to last month....

One thing i noticed is literally days up before the announcement of the interest rate increase there was a lot of properties showing up on the market, but within days of the announcement most of the properties i was tracking or made offers on went under contract or dissipated from the MLS. So it seems the market has become stronger with the lack of availability.

I get that, but does renting out part of the house not make it count as an investment property?

Hello All, 

I am really new to 1031 exchanges, i have never actually used this process even tho i have sold a few rentals over the years. I really wish i knew about this back then, but cant change the past. 

My question is can i sell a rental property to use the equity in the form of a 1031 exchange to purchase a larger SFH that i can live out of and rent out some of the other rooms?

The reasoning behind this is all my rentals are in 5 different states due to military moving constantly, one of my rentals is up over 100k in equity, but the rental cash flow from it is fairly low, if i sold it i could net like 16 years of rental income immediately and flip that into a larger house in an area id prefer to live and possibly retire in 20+ years. Some of the houses im seeing in this area the 350-500k range are big houses in the 4-5 bedroom range with most having 3 car garages. I have seen a few foreclosures in the 300k range needing work with past sales histories in the 400-500k range. 

Thanks for sharing that, i was not thinking of it that way honestly, just was trying to figure out how people are switching to multifamilies and able to make more money on rentals... just was not making sense....

I guess i am expecting to much out of my rentals, just trying to buy into good deals for rentals.. not just buy into anything.. 

My question is this.. If you can buy SFH netting you $250/door cashflow for 200k, but most duplexs are around $100-125/door for 250-300k, why would i invest in the duplex over the SFH?

I am looking for active flippers in the tampa bay area, i have never really done a flip, but through owning my current rentals over the years i have pretty much touched repairing every part of a house. I have been actively seeking another rental in the area, but all my offers keep coming up short and would like to network and maybe work with a local flipper on a property to gain additional experience. I am not looking to become a flipper to say, just looking to learn more about it so i can better judge the properties i see needing a lot of work on the market that i typically stay away on making offers on. 

Hello All, 

I am currently in the process of learning more about investing in multifamily properties, i currently have 5 single families, so i have no experience in them. I have been running the numbers locally on whats been on the market for sale this year and im just not seeing numbers that make sense. Currently i have been looking for a property that puts $200/door in my pocket, since that is what my single families net me currently and after running the numbers, im just not finding these prices... ive made 41 offers on multifamiles this year so far in 2018 with no luck yet, am i just asking for to unrealistic of a profit from these?

Example:

Duplex, listed recently for $249,000, 2 bed/2 bath/ 1 car garage

The property was in decent shape with 1 side already rented about $75 below market and one side vacant. The property was very clean, but extremely outdated except for the roof. The A/C on both sides were pre-2000 units, the inside had stick down vinyl square flooring, overall it was clean enough to rent out, just very dated. I figured at least a coat of paint at min to make rentable, or about 20k to bring both sides up to date partially... 

So i made an offer of $225k, because that put my cashflow at $408/month or $204/door... turned down..

So i made an offer of $230k, immediately was turned down.... property sat on market for 21 more days...

So on day 22, i made an offer of 235k, immediately was turned down... property sat on market for 4 more days before the agent called me asked me if i would go 244k, i told them i was firm at 235k, because that placed me at $140/door... next day the property went pending sale.... 

I am just a little confused how are people buying these properties and making any decent money out of the properties overpaying, i did my homework and the rent on the properties in the area was below this one already, because this was the only duplex in the area with a garage on each side, so justified it was worth a little more for the garage.....

Wow very interesting, just a quick glance at tenant cloud and its very well laid out.. gonna have to spend more time studying it.

WOW, thank you everyone for the great input. This is a lot to take in, i have been trying to look more into Cozy as i was reading into it more and found that many of the features they use quickbooks has already been added to Cozy. I am debating trying out Cozy vs Quickbooks at the moment. I looked into Appfolio and it requires 50+ units on signup, and when i contacted Buildium they said i had to have 10+ units to use, so those will not work for me at the moment. 

Just to be clear i have always used PM in the past, this is something new i am learning about now before i try to run my own property management. I am very educated on Excel, we used it 98% of the time for tracking when i was in the military. I worked in a SCIF for many years and we used it to track the locations of over 1.2 million items, logging when people removed and returned items via the Excel document. We even had it setup so we used a scanner to scan the RFID tags on the items, it would search the database for the item, then it would trigger that it was being removed and date stamp the info into excel document along with the ID card number of the member checking the items out. was pretty barbaric, but it worked well..

In regards to PODIO, i have become extremely knowledgeable with it, i me even try using it as it is a very powerful program to use, but i will probably start with either quickbooks or cozy from the start when i start managing my first property and repeat it on podio to see if it functions the way i need it, but from what i understand everything i need is already functional in Cozy right now to use and it makes it simple to collect rent. 

Things that people have brought up so far...

Collect rent, already in cozy

Track income per property and client, already in cozy

Track expenses per property and client, already in cozy plus allows you to take pictures of receipts or upload scanned

Track income per property and client, already in cozy

Communicate privately with client, already in cozy

Export history on clients for court or taxes with copies of receipts, already in cozy

The more and more i think about it, i may just start with Cozy and study more about quickbooks. I have watched multiple videos on youtube on people tracking rentals on quickbooks and all the functions they were tracking and doing so far are in Cozy, except cozy has the ability for people to collect rent and autopay.. 

I came across Cozy as a possible option, is there things that i would need that cozy is missing?

Thank you for your input, i looked into 2 of the 3 and they require you to have like 50+ units to use the service. I am looking for like under 10.