All Forum Posts by: CK Hwang

Hey everyone, I was just working on my company's standard operating procedures and wanted to run a quick survey for those of you who flip.

For homes that have un permitted additions what is your most likely course of action?

1. leave the un permitted addition as is, but ensure it is safe, and declare to the next buyer when done rehabbing

2. Work with the city to get the permits drawn up and permitted so the house is completely legit

3. Not even consider flip projects with non permitted additions

4. Return the house to original floor layout

Keep in mind, these are homes that you are going to re sell and not keep and hold in portfolio for rental. Thank you.

HI Naseeb, I'm not a wholesaler but buy from wholesalers, so here is what I feel are things you can do to make yourself appealing for investors to work with

1. Get your numbers right. My advice is to program an excel spreadsheet and then stick to the numbers. Also once it is correctly programmed, there is a small chance you can make mistakes

2. If you're bringing a deal to the investor, it's best if you can have it under contract. Avoid shopping around a deal that other wholesalers are shopping around. Sometimes I get the same deal brought to me by 3-4 different wholesalers. All in all it always comes across as shady

3. When you're starting out with investors, building trust is a must. Under estimated repair fees or over estimated ARVs are barriers to building trusts, as are deals with shady structures.

4. Be upfront about how much and how you want to be paid.

5. Avoid bringing deals to investors that are already on the MLS or listed with an agent. Odds are, we're scanning the MLS everyday and would probably have seen and put an offer on it if it was a doable deal.

Hope this helps.

Seriously, the fact that you can see this through for 3 years and keep going, respect to you @Will Barnard

This is one of those cases that would seriously test my resolve at being a real estate investor big time.

Thank you for sharing. We hear so much about success, that when stories like yours comes along, the ability to rise from previous mistakes, it is so much more inspiring.

Hey @Robert Leonard, thanks for the encouragement. I know another one will come along, these deals are just like trains. I think it is just the competitive nature in me, that and the difficulty in finding good deals.

I've never been able to refresh a whole house for anything less than $10K, but you might be able to do lower, since I am getting social prices. For a 1100 sqft house, I would roughly budget around $13 000 based on my spreadsheet calculators.

Hi Joey, personally, I would wait out the 2 weeks but start getting feedback from the people that walked through. Depending on your market, 2 weeks all in all might not be all that long.

Personally, I would worry about the final transacted price of the other house, the reason being that the final recorded transacted price can be manipulated in lots of ways to make the purchase price look lower.

Many of my buyers tend to request this. i.e. in my last flip, the offer price was $700K+, however to reduce the property tax, the seller offered to pay for escrow, title, agent commission, etc etc, in exchange for me to lower the selling price of the property. This finally dropped property price to the $670K mark, saving the new owner approximately $300 a year in property taxes.

Hey everyone, just wanted to start a thread because I just missed out on a deal. Someone else's offer was accepted over mine. Ok, Ok, I know this is just part and parcel of being a real estate investor, but i just wanted to vent a little.

Really, when I look back, it's probably my fault for low balling the deal. Just wanted to vent and see if anyone else ever gets frustrated when they lose out on a deal? Or am I taking this too emotionally and I should just move on?

I guess part of the emotions comes from the pressure I put on myself to try and do X number of flips a year and missing out on a deal means it gets harder and harder to meet those targets.

Hi Vinet, honestly, I think the answer to your question really depends on the economics of where you are investing. Personally, I stick to single families for the reasons that are specific to my area

1. Both Single and Multi families in my area generally yield around 5%, my logic is why deal with 2 or 3 or 4 renters for the same yield when I can just deal with 1.

2. I prefer the liquidity of single family and I find capital appreciation to be a little higher.

3. Less management required for single family. They cover their own water, power gas, etc.

4. In some senses easier to maintain. You need to fix something you just sort it out with 1 person/family. Attached multifamily like a roof leak? sometimes you're going to have to co-ordinate repair time and work with 2 families, twice the headache.

Now, not to say I don't like multi families completely. I don't mind detached units, or MFs that are bigger like 10+ units where getting a management company to deal with it is tenable. I find the 2-4 units in my area to be this middle ground that is hard to justify.

Check the vents! the last rehab I did had such a bad mice problem (they were nesting in the vents and the insulation), that the previous owners blocked the vents with plastic bags because the smell of mice poop and pee was just percolating the house. On a hot day, the smell coming out of the vents made your eyes water.

The extermination company came out to clean the mice poop, filled 3 full trash bags each waist high with nothing but mice poop.