All Forum Posts by: CK Hwang

@Kevin Lefeuvre, sorry it didn't work out for you. For myself, I let them handle my entire remodel and their prices have  pretty much been in line with market prices with the added bonus of them doing the project management for me, but most of the jobs I throw at them are on the larger scale of $100K plus.   

Hey @Danielle Friberg, I know I'm late to your reply, but the construction guys that do all the work for me once made a good point. They had said that if I was planning on doing lots of flip spread over a large geographical area (i do flips from SD to LA and Riverside), it makes sense to go with a bigger company like Home Depot, or Build Direct for your supplies so that you can tap into their existing logistics chain. This would help your business to cover a larger area. 

In the past, we had a hard time covering a large area because we had to micro manage getting our supplies to the job site or getting our contractors to do it, and it limited the quantity and area of the flips we could do. With this tip, it really changed our business model and we can now access so many more deals.

Hope this helps.  

Sorry, super late to the game because i haven't logged into this forum in months, but I would really like to vouch for @Bill Larsen and @Joe Homs as being real estate agents I have worked with or gotten to know and believe that they really know what they are talking about and have made me money. 

@Gary F. sorry, i know I'm super late to this post, but where I've been finding better cash flow is real estate in Riverside with more properties in the 5-7% yield range. 

In some cases, I've also found some positive cash flow in commercial residential in OC, however, the yield on these tend to be awful due to the large downpayment one has to throw in. Personally, I don't think in terms of market cycle, that now is the time to be buying for cash flow in OC. 

Hi Kevin, I know I'm super late to this post, but all my flips re handled by the guys at Bluwave Development. Their website is www.bluwavedev.com.

Their prices are middle of the line, but what I really like is that they take care of my projects from beginning to end to the extent that I no longer need to even step foot on the properties I buy and I can just focus on finding new deals. They have a nice backend system that allows me to monitor the progress of the project remotely. 

Your post is perfect! I'm currently in the middle of a really crappy patch right now, and I'm no master, but I'm still willing to share my story of having gone wrong. 

So right now, I have 2 houses on the market that has taken 4 months to bring to market. If they sell at market, I would have effectively made $0 in profit, and it cost me roughly $1.4m all in. Talk about going nowhere fast. 

Oh where did it all go wrong? I started to become too trusting of 1 contractor, and the company jacked up the prices, did really poor quality jobs, took a really long time, such that by the time the houses hit the market and the escalation of costs, I've made no money. So from this I've learned that no matter how comfortable I get with a contractor, I need to constantly be bidding out jobs (admittedly I was getting lazy on this part) and constantly on the worksite monitoring quality. 

The upside to all this is that it has forced me to spend more time looking for better more efficient contractors that I can trust and I believe this will failure will lead the groundwork for better flips in the future. 

I think more than anything else that bums me out is that these properties were bought well and promised to have good profit margins, but due to my own laziness my lunch got eaten by someone else. Good deals with good margins are hard to find and when an opportunity like this is squandered, it hurts. 

Thanks for letting me vent.  

Personally, I would talk to other investors in your area, get a good ball park figure of what the returns are flipping in your area of interests. A rough number around that mark would be a good start and from there you can decide if the returns from flipping warrants your time, risks and effort. Of course, if you can do more, kudos to you. 

Keep in mind as well, flipping numbers are dynamic. In my market, the flipping yields have fallen considerably over the last 2 years due to the increase in property values. So in time to come, you'll probably need to amend to opening that number. If your market is hot the ROI can change very very quickly.

Hi Matt, I work the OC market as well. As far as finding something cash flowing, it's hard to say if there is or there isn't because everyone's cash flow number is different. 

Assuming you're getting funds at the usual 30 yr at roughly 4%, it's hard to find cash flowing in OC. I'm generally finding about 5.5% gross returns on rent, all said and done, maybe I'll cash flow $200-300 per door with 30% down, but on a $600K plus property, the cash on cash return is pretty dismal. 

I think OC, for rental cash flow, either you need to do the specialized housing market like rehab homes, vacation rentals, or huge projects like apartment complexes. Single family, I think the market gone too high. Not to say you wont get lucky and stumble on something, I just think to find cash flowing houses day in and day out is unlikely unless you are ok with exceptionally low cash on cash returns.  

Hey Jose, personally as a buyer, I would have no problem downloading a proof of funds and emailing the PDF to you. That is a pretty routine procedure for just about everyone I deal with from wholesalers to realtors to homeowners. And if for some reason I couldn't, I would tell you honestly so that you can decided if you want to deal with me or not. So no, I don't think you are asking too much even if the person is "reputable."

Now, that being said, as a buyer, if i have never worked with you before or spoken to you or gotten to know you in some way, I would be very nervous about sending you a proof of funds. I have had some shady dealings in the past where a wholesaler used my proof of funds to lock up a property, even though he had told me they had the property locked up but actually they didn't (long complicated story). And that is why nowadays I am super wary of working with wholesalers. I know there are good and honest ones out there, but dang they are hard to find.   

I used to live next to Richmond in El Cerrito, and i think Richmond hills was a nice area.There is also a pocket next to the yacht club that is really nice. I think like all cities, there is housing that span the gamut.