All Forum Posts by: Wesley Sherow

@Kristy Borwegen good morning, not sure about any secret non-public ways of handling this, but there is something you can do. I will add that it's likely not worth your time or effort, but that said here's the tips: 

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, from the city at least. 
- Call codes, cite the building for violations. 
- Are they good people living next door? Is there heavy drug use? Consider calling the cops when applicable. 
- Is the building in severe disrepair? Are utilities working? If not, it's inhabitable, codes can condemn the building. 

As for finding the owner:
- Reonomy, property shark, and other scraping websites are a good consideration for finding them. 

Hope this helps! 

Elizabeth,

In my experience it's most helpful in the STR world to simply heavily integrate your property with multiple lead sources. After that any additional effort is not going to scale as well. Find a good PMS such as guesty, and integrate with AirBnB, VRBO, TripAdvisor, Booking.come, Agoda, etc, etc, etc.

That's the biggest bang for your buck in terms of effort spent to get more leads. Then after that consider all of the less scalable approaches as seen above, such as targeted ads, community chat groups, etc. 

Good luck! 

Good morning Ben!

I am quite surprised by some of the prices in your post, since i'm familiar with the upstate market. A couple things that surprise me: 
- $10,000 cash for keys is absurd. At most i've seen $500-1,000. Don't exceed that. Cash for keys should be assessed against your expenses. If it would take you $500 in attorney fees and 2 months to evict someone, then theoretically you break even at about $4,500 - so MAYBE that's justified on the cash for keys route, but remember at the end of an eviciton you get a judement for the full amount, meaning it's worth it to a tenant to get $500 in cash and have their debt forgiven, or get out of their lease. It's not black and white. 
- $450 per hour is not a normal rate. I pay $550-600 for an eviction as a flat rate. It's not a complicated legal process and usually involves one in person meeting for the attorney with the court. And often good evicitons attorneys line up their evicitons back to back so they're doing 2-5 cases in the course of one hour. 

Questions: 
Is it worth paying them? $10,000? No.

Rent is always still due. It's likely the fixes you need to make you'd need to make regardless. If that's what holding up your payment, then go for it. 

Once ERAP makes a payment, the tenant still has to make rent payments AFTER they are approved and paid out from ERAP, so yes start the evictions process over from the immediate next missed payment. 

Unless Newburg is for some reason largely different from Albany, Troy, Cohoes which is my wheel house, it seems you're ill advised on this subject. 

@Steven Luttman, I do note and agree that in the Lansingburgh area it seems the quality of product there isn't the best. That's promising to hear however. Thank you for that feedback! 

@Nathanael Leece I invest mainly in the Albany, New York and surrounding region. In general there are great deals out there that WILL allow you to cash flow on a house hack property. I very carefully make the statement of I think you're looking in the wrong places. In general, especially if you haven't purchased a house before, there's plenty of opportunity to go out there and find something in the $200,000 range that WILL generate you income above and beyond your monthly payment, even while living there. Consider in this that there are properties out there that have 3 and even 4 apartments all the way up and around the $200,000 price point. 

Add in the possibility to purchase a property that needs some extra work that you can do yourself, and then you're really cooking. You can even go the extra step and AirBnB your vacancy. Although you're signing up for a little bit more work, if that doesn't pay your mortgage I'll quit doing real estate. 

That said, upstate NY is a pretty large place. Where specifically are you looking? 

Hey Nathan, in my opinion the real concern about borrowing from family members for down payments is the financial relationship itself not necessarily terms. It's important that you arrange terms that you know you'll be able to handle, because nobody wants to have tough conversations with family about money. Here's a good resource on that: https://www.debt.org/credit/lo...

I made some changes to what I think is the most important part of this article:
The good part of receiving a loan from a friend or family member is that the family member you borrow from likely to be flexible about the amount borrowed and payment arrangements. That means you could borrow 100% of the amount you need at a very low-interest rate – possibly 0% — and get an affordable monthly repayment schedule. Treat a personal loan issued by a loved one with mountains more respect and professionalism as you would a loan from a bank.

Basically, whatever you agree to make sure you follow through because the implications of borrowing from family are much greater. If you want to treat the loan as traditionally as possible, and not make a profit off of family, then standard hard money borrowing terms (leveraged, but that's optional) is roughly this: 
- 80% LTV
- 7-10% interest rates, (15-20% unleveraged)
- 6 months to 1 year balloon payment, assuming you're borrowing this money to do a project and eventually refinance into a traditional loan

Hope this helps! 

I highly recommend Lev Capital. It's one of the fastest growing Brokers, and they just did an excellent job for me on a refi. Check it out! 

Hey @Mason Hilkert, I run a small boutique property management company in Albany. We are expanding into AirBnBs heavily, and will have over 30 rentals in the next 6 months. I would be interested in co-hosting, however there's a lot that goes into it, and the work load can vary depending on how things are structured. If you like, add me and we can schedule a coffee meet to discuss. 

@Cynthia Perez A few things I noted here you may want to consider.
1. Does the co-op allow AirBnB? STR Is commonly restricted in Co-ops. Get a copy of the by-laws.
2. A good attorney will allow you to determine use for this unit, review the by-laws, and see what the implications are. 
3. It's common for there to be hurdles in getting mortgages or lending on co-ops. Finding out the specific reason why the seller believes it won't qualify would be a good start. You may consider hard-money at 8-10% if you think it's worthwhile. 

Seller financing is an excellent option here as long as you can get good terms. 15% down is not bad, and the monthly payment at a somewhat standard rate is going to be low at $159k. Keep in mind you don't know the quality of work that you're getting as a part of the HOA, and depending on whether you do AirBnB, you're expecting more than average wear and tear, and possibly unreliable maintenance. Assume you'll have to do a lot yourself in that case.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. I hope it helps a bit, best of luck! 

@Nathan Kawalerski while i'm unaware of any online zoom style meetups, I would be interested in attending one if you do find, or decide to start one. I travel so frequently that I rarely am able to line up any of the in-person events.