All Forum Posts by: Tommy Parker

If you bought the first property in an fha you are going to have to refinance into a conventional, but even still with that you may have to wait a full year until you can do anything unless you refinance, and/or have made enough capital improvements. Make sure to check the terms of your mortgage, your lender should be able to tell you if you ask them. After a year you can buy another property with an FHA loan assuming you don't already have one or refinanced out of one. If you have a friend or partner that stays there and isn't on the mortgage you can also partner with them and take partial ownership. A good lender will be able to guide you, stay away from lenders that tell you that you can't do it, or boast how many years they have been doing that. I say this from experience. I bought my first property conventional and rented the rooms, than just bought a duplex with an FHA loan after a year of owning it/living in it (the conventional single family home I had). A good lender will guide you on how to do it, they are out there, you may need to go through a good amount to find one that is good if the one you have currently cannot help.

I don't have experience buying in a different country but I think this would hold true everywhere. Find. A. Investor. Friendly. Agent. 

This will make your life way easier and essentially serve as a coach through this process. Ideally the person would be a house hacker themselves or have experience with it. 

We prescreen tenants before scheduling showings. This weeds out a lot of the chaff so we can focus on qualified and quality applicants.

First they have to watch a video tour of the home to confirm they still like the layout, etc. 

Next they have to complete a (free) preliminary application where we ask them questions about income, evictions, etc. This isn't fool proof since its all honor system, but we do remind them that major discrepancies between the preliminary application, and the full application, will be interrupted as an integrity issue and a major ding on their application.

Only if they watch the video and if their preliminary application is satisfactory will we get in the car to do a showing.

@Spencer Krautkramer I’m not in Wisconsin but am in NH and in April bought a property where rents were $750 below market rents and for the tenants that had been there long term the rents hadn’t increased in over 6 years.

I gave them 3 months notice and raised their rents on average $250 and in a couple of cases $275. I only had 1 tenant move out.

I am also switching it over to where they will now be paying for their own heat in addition to the rent increase.

It will still be slightly under market rent but has totally increased the value of the property by about 100%.