All Forum Posts by: Wesley Sherow

Anna, you'll find that refinancing properties is actually a relatively inflexible field. That's at least the case in my experience. You have a few items to play with here; LTV, Interest rates, Term of the loan, and the impact your credit score and PFS might play.

The most equity you can pull out is often going to be with Private lending, which on hard money rates can go from 75% as a standard LTV to a maximum of 90% in certain circumstances. The interest rates you pay for this will range anywhere from 7% to 13% in most cases where you're getting asset backed secured funds. 

Some hard money lenders go much higher on rates, but most that underwrite with the property to secure the loans won't. I recommend Lev Capital as a broker to explore this with. They take 1% but in my experience it's well earned on their part. 

Best of luck! 

Derrek, if it helps please consider using a financial model to calculate the returns on your investment. Here's one that I made that might work for you. This model is not the most first-time user friendly - I intend to make a new one in the future to share on BP forums, but it's not overly complex as some may be. 

This model I made to be a "one-pager" that calculates the entire investment from top to bottom. Hope it helps! 

https://docs.google.com/spread...

I see you got plenty of Yes's, but it's leaving out the important part here. It's actually BETTER if you do. Reduce your risk and liability and get a new LLC for each property you purchase. Want to be double safe? Invest into your purchase's LLC through ANOTHER LLC that just serves to hold equity in the LLC's you get.

LLC's are a magic entity you can use to insulate your person from risk related to real estate investments EXCEPT for criminal or gross negligence. 

Kole, 

I'm not in those areas but instead the capital region of Albany, Schenectady, Troy. If you ever find your way over to my neck of the woods in your investment journey please reach out! I love connecting with newer investors in the area. Good luck! 

I just spent some time reading up on the above comments, and I don't condone the flak that traveling nurses are getting here. These are extreme generalizations. The traveling nurse industry is extremely difficult to live in, as I've heard from family in the field. 

There are people from all walks of life in many different professions, and ANYONE renting in the short term space runs risk of being tough to manage. Short term rentals are treated a lot like hotel travelers, and thus the standards are MUCH  higher than long term rentals. Hospitality becomes a factor. 

Previously I operated 40 short term rental arbitrage units in Jersey City, and during that time I had thousands of travelers every few months. It's the transient space that is more work and headache, not particular professions of people.

Let's give some credit to traveling nurses for being an important part of society. 

Good morning Andrew. I've rented to plenty of Traveling Nurses in the Albany area, so i'll chime in here. Firstly, yes in the Albany market there is a lot of demand for that category of traveler, but i've also found that similar opportunities can be found in other professions as well. For example recently I rented several studios to traveling electricians for an engineering company. 

With that said, I don't think that special websites are needed here, especially if they don't integrate with PMS software. This category of traveler falls into the bucket of short term rental and corporate rental. If you furnish your newly renovated units and put them on AirBnB, VRBO, Booking.com, Agoda, etc via a channel manager, you'll be able to maximize the returns there. I'd also add that you could limit your nights available to only increments of 7 days so that you're not going completely transient. 

To be very competitive and command the highest rates, it's very recommended to spend about 10-15% of your budget on a good designer who knows the short term rental space. I've been in that space in Albany for about 5 years now and whereas it used to be easy to get away with quite any mom/pop style rental, the national trend for beautiful experience driven rentals is starting to hit albany. 

The cost to operate a short term/corporate rental includes utilities, wifi, cost of furniture, and consumables. I developed a website that can help do the financial modeling on an investment in the short term space, in case that's helpful. It pre-fills a lot of your expenses using market data, however it's customizable if you know your numbers. www.strbrain.com.

If you're looking for a short term rental manager in the area keep me posted, my company does handle that as well. I hope this was helpful! Best of luck. 

I want to add in a small borderline unethical strategy to maximize on a refinance. (Don't worry it'll be ethical soon enough). Short term rentals are notorious for being difficult to finance with a bank as the STR industry is relatively new and not market tested as of quite yet to allow big lenders to consider them investible via a refinance. However with that in mind there do exist some lenders that will allow STR income to be presented on a refinance.

On an occasion or two I've seen friends/family or connections agree to be on lease agreements and take responsibility for the rent payment on paper, while the owner/operator was able to short term rent the property for much more than the rent payment. They would then pay in to the rent for the leased unit and take any margin as dividend. 

If you choose to take this approach, it's a way to increase your rents by a little bit over their market priced equivalent to get a better refinance out of a property. This mainly works for commercial sized multifamily however as NOI is valued over comps in those situations.

It's also not the most scalable solution, however a good little trick on your first couple investments as you're trying to maximize your income. 

Congrats Zach on the purchase. If it's only a total of $5,000 in on the cash investment off of a $92k purchase price, that's a killer LTV on the investment.

Hey Jin,

I saw nobody responded here, but I did have a recommendation when seeing your post here. Consider going onto facebook marketplace or craigslist and picking out a couple to try on particular jobs. Alternatively, reach out to other small scale property owners through meetup groups in the area. 

Finding a reliable handyperson is deceptively difficult.  Even great ones may seem to appear on occasion that you should still take the time to review their work on the first few jobs. 

Anyway best of luck! 

Hi Andy,

I will throw my hat in the ring here. I'm not a contractor however i'm now doing a large enough scale of work for my own investments that I was able to put together a full time crew. I'm looking to utilize them as much as possible, as the key for them to continue steam rolling my own purchases is to keep them busy year round. 

A bit of background, I developed a community of investors that invests in my purchases, and the scale of that has gone off the charts in the last year. If you're interested in working together feel free to contact me with the information in my signature. Either way best of luck with your renovations!