All Forum Posts by: Thomas Daly

Does anybody have a company in North Jersey they would recommend to 1) remove the tank, 2) test the soil 3) and install above ground? I see many companies on google, but I would love to receive input from this community.

Thank you for your response!  In regards to the seller not wanting to remove a working tank because of the conversion cost to natural gas, can't the tank be removed out of the ground and installed above ground, thus no conversion cost? For example, I am thinking of structuring my offer contingent on the following to be completed before closing:

1) Oil Tank removed from the ground ($2000?)

2) Soil test to confirm no leaks and enable proper certificates ($500?)

3) Oil Tank installed above ground ($1200?)

Hello! I have spent the past year reading these forums and books in prep for my first purchase, and one major take-away is to be extremely cautious on properties with underground oil tanks. The instructions on how to proceed on a house with an underground decomissioned oil tank are clear. i.e. Only purchase the property if the seller removes the tank and tests the soil, and a clean bill of health is given. If this cannot be done, find another property.

I have come across a property I want to move forward on, but it has an In-Use underground oil tank. Are the risks the same with an in-use underground oil tank? Should/Can the same strategy be used in regards to the offer language with an in use oil tank? I.e. offer is based on oil tank removal + clean bill of health? 
 

Thanks for the response @Jonathan R McLaughlin. Good points on the perspective of rates being at historic lows, I am very happy about that :) What I am confused about is the feedback I am receiving that FHA interest rates are very high. I was assuming FHA interest rates would be similar, if not better, than conventional. I was doing my analysis logic on a FHA loan with 3.5% down, a competitive interest rate, and the PMI. What I am now finding is that the interest rates are high on FHA so it throws off my analysis logic unfortunately. Perhaps I shop around to other lenders?

Hello! I am in the middle of my pre-approval process and my plans have encountered a bit of an obstacle.

I was planning on using FHA as a first time home buyer with the goal to owner occupy a duplex. This financing option fits me best as I do not have the capital to put down a 20% conventional loan for my target price range.

I was advised by my lender that for a owner occupied duplex my (very high) credit score qualifies me for the following conventional:

-15% down

-3.37% interest rate

-30 year fixed

I was told that this is the lowest down payment I could get for a conventional loan. And that the only other options for a lower down payment on an owner occupied duplex is a first time home buyer program that I do not qualify for because my salary is to high, and of course FHA.

I was told that FHA has changed given the current COVID19 situation and that FHA does not want to insure loans so they are making the terms high in the form of high interest rates.

I have searched the forums, twitter, google, etc, and cannot find firm data confirming this. I actually am finding the opposite on mortgage rate average websites that state FHA interest rates are still lower than conventional.

Does anybody have an idea on what is going on with FHA? I would love to use this financing option, but if the interest rates are high I guess I will just wait for COVID to slow down and hope the rates change.

I have spent the past 12 months reading the forums, particularly on how to sharpen up my skills on crunching the numbers on potential deals, to mitigate the risk of making a poor investment decision. I made a resolution that 2020 is the year that I will make my first real estate purchase, and I plan on going through with it! My plan is to buy a property, live in it as my primary residence, and to eventually move out of the property but keep as an investment. As such I did my analysis on the assumption for this future scenario, where I have moved out and all units are being rented.

I have found that investors have many different ways of crunching the numbers. What I have done is taken the different aspects of several calculators I have seen on this website and tailored it to my own criteria. My long term goal is not to manage a rental property empire, but to own a few properties to diversify my investment portfolio away from only stocks, bonds, etc.

Are there any glaring mistakes in the below? Something that is a risky assumption? Note the the property mentioned below is completely made up and not real, the purpose of the below is to validate assumptions and formulas on cost.

Thanks for your help, Joe P! I knew I was missing something huge. I have updated the table to include CAPEX. I used 10% of gross rents as this seems to be a good conservative figure when doing initial deal analysis (per BP forum posts). Totally realize CAPEX will vary per house type, age, etc. On city fees/licenses waivers I will need to research this a bit further. For utilities, I have put only water/sewage (cost pulled from city of Newark website) as my plan is to have tenants pay for the other monthly utilities. I was a renter in Hudson County, NJ for several years and this was the norm. Depending on market norm, I will tweak this figure.

Hello - I am still about a year away from having enough capital to purchase my first investment property. Until then, I have been reading as much as I can on this site. I still do not feel I am to the point where I can quickly look at a deal on the MLS and at least be able to have an indication of whether it makes sense to look at it further for more intense number crunching. To practice I have been perusing zillow/trulia/njmls and then crunching the numbers in the below excel file I found on BP. For example, I just ran the numbers on the below property. Are the cost assumptions I am making fairly accurate? Or am I doing something that is very obviously wrong. I believe I am screwing something up as most deals I analyze seem to produce OK returns which I know is not the norm for North NJ.

https://www.trulia.com/p/nj/newark/39-fillmore-st-...

*to clarify again, I am not looking to purchase this property, just using as an example for "analysis practice"