All Forum Posts by: Troy Gandee

@Anne Christensen Feel free to reach out when you're here. You can shoot me a DM and I'll send contact info. If you're here on Feb 6th, we'll be holding out big monthly investors meetup from 6-8pm through REI Central. We usually have 80-100 people in the room.

Hi @Anne Christensen 

We're all investors over at Maven Realty. One of us will be happy to help you if you haven't found someone yet!

@Minnina Smith You guys have a great meetup there. I believe it used to be called REI Live, but is Deal Finders or something like that now. You can find them on Facebook.

@Jose Remor These are great suggestions here. I would recommend you really take your time selecting the right software. Do some demos and make sure you feel very comfortable with the one you ultimately select.

If you're unsatisfied, it's a huge hassle to have to transition later when you have multiple properties under management. Don't choose something overly complicated. You want it to be easy for your tenants to use to avoid non-payment or technological issues on their end, too.

@Eli Fazzo The 6% rate is a bit of a misnomer. That's the starting rate and then there are millage rates that bring it down to the actual tax rate. The 4% and 6% rates are just the names given to differentiate commercial and owner-occupied.

The 6% rate is obviously significantly high, but it's fairly average nationally. It would likely be comparable to what you pay in the NE.

Just google "Lexington County tax estimator" or whatever county you're interested in and you'll usually find a web tool from the County you can use to estimate the tax bill based on the previous year's assessments.

There is also a law called the ATI tax exemption that can potentially lower than 6% rate by 25%. Just look that up. There are conditions that must be met.

Also, I believe the taxes are higher in Richland County than Lexington County, but I don't like there, so I don't have personal experience with that. I've just heard that from many people over the years.

In general, SC is experiencing an economic renaissance, so it is a good time to invest here. 

@Mark Hamilton Feel free to check out REI Central. We have the most activity and most frequent groups (1 main meetup and 3 subgroups each month). Our annual pass is stupid cheap for what we offer.

I will say that while we do have a whole lot of sub2 investors that attend these groups, we don't put an emphasis on that strategy. It's a pretty murky niche and everyone does it a little differently, so we don't want to give platform to anyone that may give risky advice. There's a glut of sub2 education/information out there these days, so you certainly won't lack in that regard.

Some of our members have done hundreds of them without issue, so just seek those people out at the meetings and talk to them.

Hi @Constantinos Zavos. @Patrick Roberts is correct. ATI is only applicable for 6% (commercial properties). If this is a primary residence, it does not apply. That's mostly because we already get the 4% residence tax rate for your primary residence, which is a very low tax rate.

As long as what you purchased is commercial, you can apply for it. The exemption is either the previous assessment amount or 25% less of the new assessed value, whichever is higher. It's not really worth doing if you don't have enough of an assessment difference to actually get a 25% reduction. A lot of properties don't enough spread to even meet that minimum, so it just ends up being the new assessment ratio.

It's actually really easy to fill out the application and submit, but they will not respond and tell you whether or not it's been approved. You basically don't know until you get the bill. Bills are already out for the year, so it may be difficult to get them to adjust it for this cycle. The bill is due in about 45 days.

I'm not sure what county you're in, but here's a link to Charleston County's form. I have also heard that they will not take these retroactively for the previous year, but it's still pretty vague.

https://www.charlestoncounty.org/files/forms/tax/ATI-Exempti...

@Kyle McShea Like @Sarah Kozlik said, you should definitely join us at REI Central if you plan to get more involved in the investing space. We meet monthly and have 3 sub-group meetings the rest of the month for our annual members.

@Jacob D Adamczak has helped a lot of people purchase house hacks. He's a fountain of knowledge with this strategy if you need more assistance.

This could be the case in some market, but as other have mentioned, certain markets are experiencing the opposite. I'm in Charleston and our market has hardly slowed despite rates. Our inventory is low. It has been too low even prior to covid. We have about 1/2 the homes on market we should have. It's legitimately a supply and demand issue. 

I've been hearing about this impending "crash" for about 5 years now. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. 

@Chris Seveney Correct. An attorney who is on the board with the REC was in the room during most of these conversations. His name is Gary Pickren. He recused himself in many conversations/votes because he closes a lot of these types of deals, but he was there for the conversations. It's not a mystery that the intention was to essentially stop wholesaling. The legislators wrote this bill in a way to cut it off at multiple angles. You can still use the legal instrument of an assignment of contract, but not as a wide spread business practice. These closing attorneys do not want to be accessory to what the REC would consider unlawful practices. They're not willing to face the SC Supreme Court and put their law licenses on the line over these deals.

You can find Gary talking about this in a couple of different videos now. He's been meeting with different REI groups and explaining this bill.