All Forum Posts by: Tom Aiello

There can also be (especially west coast and Hawaii) seismic issues.  Wood frame construction withstands seismic activity much better (because it can flex and remain standing) than brick or block (which tends to shift and fall).

It's slower and more expensive.  I have a friend who is a real estate developer in Europe.  He was in Greece (where he's from) and then came to the USA to do a master's in real estate (he's now in London).

His comment was "Why aren't we building with wood framing?  It's so much faster and cheaper!"  I'm pretty sure he thought that building US style subdivisions with wood framing would revolutionize the Greek real estate market.  I think he's still waiting on the economy there to recover before he tries it, though.

Any title search should identify all the liens on the property.  And you're going to need a title search to close anyway.

LLC rules are very different in various states. I've formed multiple LLC's here (Idaho) but our rules are _very_ easy. $100 and an on-line form is all you need to register, and you can use whatever boilerplate set of documents you like for organization.

We had a seller refuse to give us that kind of information, and we just walked away.

You could always go door to door at the property and ask, but it's hard to get hard info that way.

At the very least you _need_ to see leases for all the current tenants to make sure you know what they are supposed to be paying (and what rights you have to evict them if you need to).

If there are no leases, check your local laws, but in those cases I'd assume you're going to have to evict everyone and start over.  A couple people will be ok and sign your new lease, but just assume 100% turn over and then re-examine the deal and decide if you still want to dive into it.

 I was more thinking it was a crazy achievement.

My wife has drawn a lot of her thinking from him, so we tend to pay off our properties very quickly (under 3 years in every case so far) but we've never bought a property entirely in cash the way he has.  And we tend to leverage our existing properties for down payments on the new ones, which he has never done.

@Axelson John   Definitely start by grabbing a copy of "Set for Life" by Scott Trench, and reading it cover to cover as carefully as possible.

I believe that Scott Trench and Brandon Turner have an upcoming (next fall?) book just on house hacking, but start by reading Set for Life, and you're going to be glad you did.

My responses from friends and family have almost universally been positive.  Generally along the lines of "oh, that's pretty cool."

The best comments have come from my Father in Law, who has about 30 single family rentals he's been building up (all cash--nothing every financed--how crazy is that?) for the last 15 years or so.

This book is life changing.  I give it out to young people I know, and made my kids read it.

You are.  You need a way to measure it.  And dividing it into years is a way to measure it.  Saying that it's unquantifiable because it happens over many years leaves you with no metric by which to evaluate performance.

Shouldn't the goal be making better returns each year?  How can we evaluate whether we are achieving our goals without a quantifiable way to measure progress?