All Forum Posts by: William Sing

Hard Money or Private Money would probably be the best route. Just know that hard money usually requires at least 6 months before you can refinance so account for holding costs accordingly. Hope that helps!

Hey Timothy!

1) You can talk to a lawyer about writing up a blank contract that you can fill out. Not sure if they cover your area but https://stevensness.com/ is a good site for Oregon forms. You might be able to find something specific to your state/area there. Another option is seeing if you can have an agent help you through the process and be a neutral 3rd party. They would get a certain percentage of the deal, but would be able to help you through the paper portion. 

2) You can talk to some regular flippers and get a good idea of the low, medium, and high per sqft ranges of cost. This is usually something that is hard to figure out but you can get the ballpark range initially and negotiate further once you are under contract and you can get all of the contractors in during the inspection period. Hope that helps!

Great Post Hannah! A local lender (Umpqua Bank) has a great portfolio loan. 

Hey there! I usually don't like anything that requires you to "login" to the device. They just tend to be a bit more of a pain to manage and dealing with them isn't super fun. I use Schlage door locks. Other than that I don't do doorbells or surveillance. If the tenant wants to put them in and have a hard wire you could potentially get a plug outside. 

I use apartments.com since it is free and was able to get a lot of the features I wanted in there. I've used it for my current units but if you have more units I have seen RentRedi and Buildium a lot. 

I'm excited to see you there Mike! 

@Justin Cloyd, 

Congrats on starting the investment journey! It seems that you have a lot of options at least. 

1) Does anyone have any legal advice for managing a long term rental single family house in Portland? (Attorney and PM contacts would also help.) I know it's a very tenant friendly city, so I'm worried about the legal side of things and I want to get everything set up the right way.

If you are going this route, find yourself a good property manager. Usually, you only get to the attorney part if you have a troublesome tenant. I'd check out rarebird (they are a local and have A LOT of experience). You can contact Eric Guess there. Doug Moe with 24/7 properties is also great as well. They can direct you to attornies if it gets to the point of needing to evict someone. If you are going the self-manage route, I'd take a look at the local landlord association. They have classes and forms you can buy. Here is a link to them - https://www.portlandarearoa.co...

2) Getting the right terms on the home equity loan is the key to keeping it as a rental from a cash flow standpoint, keeping the favorable existing 3.75% mortgage intact. Any recommended investor friendly Portland lenders out there that I should talk to?
At this point I would look more at HELOCs (they are different than home equity loans). You will currently not be able to find a great cash-out refi that makes sense with an interest rate. You might be able to do the cashout refi and buy down the rate significantly, but I don't think you can buy it down that much. Contact Cori Angel at Bank of England (DM Me if you want her contact info or Google it) and you might be able to talk to her about getting creative. 

3) The alternative to renting out this house is that I could take about $100k from the sale and invest it elsewhere. I'm comfortable with new development, or in Ohio rental markets (Columbus, Cincy, Dayton metro areas). Obviously understanding these investment alternatives would be on a case-by-case basis but my gut says the low interest rate on the existing mortgage makes the existing house the most fruitful deal since the Portland market has been appreciating faster than Ohio markets for the past 20 years. Development might also make sense if construction and land prices pull back a bit. What are other people's thoughts on this option?

I called about 8-10 of the local banks and bigger ones and found Keybank has the best HELOC program and OnPoint is the second best from the research I did. DM if you want me to send you some good contacts for the HELOCs. This would help get you the 100k you are looking for.

Development would be an interesting prospect. It would consume a lot of time and take a builder who can help you realize that. We are still way under the amount of homes to meet demand right now. This would be a large time suck though and if you are looking to build in Portland it will be a permitting nightmare. 

Ultimately it boils down to what do you want to do in the future? What type of investments do you want? If you want to do something that will lower maintenance and you oversee I'd look at going out of state. If you want to do a bit more work and stay local, I'd look at Salem or something a bit further outside of Portland to reinvest. 

If you want to have fun theorizing and talking let me know! I'm a big fan of architecture and would love to understand building multifamily apartments. DM if you want to set something up or you can set up a time using this link if it is easier https://calendly.com/agentlivi...

Hey Miko, 

You bring up some good questions! I'm not sure how much cash you have, but the big thing for newer investors without much cash is that the property needs to be financable by a regular bank if you are going that route. For the most part, a lot of the properties on the open market (MLS) are financeable. There usually are categories that say it is "cash-only" which means that the property may be in distress so much that it isn't conventionally financiable. I usually see this on homes that look decent but don't have a lot of photos. These properties usually don't qualify for any primary residencers to come in usually.

Deciding on if you want to end the search immediately also depends on what your circumstances are and what you are looking for. I was able to find a great duplex that had an additional level with 850 sqft for each side because it wasn't listed properly. We were able to negotiate for new carpet and paint (not easy to do anymore). I was able to force a lot more equity once I got in on one side that they didn't really show in the pictures. 

I think things can be found on the RMLS, but you need to be able to find something that makes it worth it. It would make the numbers work and not force the numbers to work as well. Finding off-market deals is a lot more time-intensive and it can work too. 

Ultimately it is up to you and how much time you want to spend analyzing deals but just some things to consider. 

Hope this helps!

Hey Spencer, 

You would need to dive into Zillow's API (https://www.zillow.com/howto/a...) in order to get the zestimates. These are not always accurate but it is up to you. I recommend using zapier to connect things or something of that nature if you are not as tech-savvy. 

Hope this helps a little bit! Feel free to call me if you have any other questions. I'm a huge fan of automating things myself. 

Hey Nina! I highly recommend reading the long-distance real estate investing book. A lot of the general concepts are good to know. Also, DM me if you want a link to the questions I asked people when trying to figure out the right people for myself!