All Forum Posts by: William Walker

I gonna agree with most others here in that 20k/year isn't enough if you're putting all of your 25k into a down payment.  Anything goes wrong and you are up the creek.  Considering you're working part time your best bet is to pick up something else part time to supplement your income.  If you think staying with the hammerheads is going to provide you with the future you want that's fine, but you can't ride out making 20k a year and expect to get rolling in real estate.  I'm from Wilmington and there are about a million landscaping jobs that you can pick up and make your same hourly rate with no experience.  Stick with a crew for a few months, have a driver's license, show up to work on time, and you'll be in charge of a crew in no time. 

If you want to ignore everyone's advice and still purchase a property, look at having your parents as cosigners assuming they have decent credit and a good DTI. Present the numbers to them and pay for everything, they just sign.

I also wouldn't say avoid downtown altogether.  There are literally multimillion dollar properties downtown.  Avoid Dawson st?  Absolutely.  But there are good properties downtown.  There are also a lot of properties in your price range in the Ogden area which is blowing up.

Most importantly you have to change your attitude towards working right now.  The 9-5 isn't the dream, but it's how you get there.  You're gonna have to grind a bit before you're making 100k off rental properties. 

you gotta tell us size, price, location, zoning, all that good noise

If you're going to raise it, I wouldn't go that big. 

I'll go against the grain here and say don't raise the rent.  I'm go on a limb and say that the peace of mind these tenants provide you is worth the difference you're gonna get in rent.  It sounds like you are literally doing nothing in terms of managing these rentals.  If these tenants can't pay then you're going to have to go through the headache of getting new tenants and establishing rules, most likely will not go as smoothly as these.  Decent chance of having to get a property manager or having to go through a lot of work to get vendors in the area.  If money isn't the driving force meaning you're not trying to get every last dollar out of these properties, then just keep the rent the same and enjoy the ride.

@Eric F.

Oh boy.  That was quite the response. 

First, I wasn't attacking you so you can relax a little.  As my previous post explained, it is not difficult to tell someone what wholesaling is.  The key part that you left out in your explanation that you quoted above is that a lot of the time, the wholesaler doesn't have the funds to purchase the house if they can't find a buyer.  That is the key aspect in all this.  Like I said before, I'm really not against anyone who wholesales.  The problem is when they misrepresent themselves to the seller and the seller thinks someone is actually buying their house.  I can't stress that enough.

It sounds like you run a great business model and that you have the funds to purchase properties, flip them, rent them, whatever.  That's awesome for you and I'm not coming down on you.  The sad reality is that most people get into wholesaling because they don't have money and they want to make fast money.  That's the real truth and if you aren't buying that then we can't progress. 

In your second paragraph you said "All I know is I am going to make sure the deal closes".  The problem with people who start wholesaling with no funds is that they can't guarantee the deal closes because if they can't find a buyer, they have to back door themselves out of the deal.  Same as I said in my first post.  So if the OP doesn't present that fact to the seller, I would say he is screwing over the seller because the seller thinks the property is sold, when in fact it is not.  I hope that didn't take up too much of your valuable time (<-that is sarcasm)

Ok sorry, I misunderstood your original post. 

You are fine with renting the property after living there for several years so no worry there. 

You can use Zillow to find comps, but I would just present it as "123 red road sold on xx/xxxx for $100,000.  It is xx sq ft and has 3 bed 2 bath"  I don't think you need to show where you got the information. 

You can also google "new hanover county property records" and you can go to the county website where you can search properties by address.  It will tell you the date the property was sold and for how much (as well as a ton of other info such as sq. ft. and who it was sold by and to).  Let me know if you need more info on this, it's a site I use a lot.

I don't mean this sarcastically, what does it matter?  I've seen zillow be off by 75% of a properties real value and so I've never put much into the zillow "estimate". I don't believe that it has any impact on your taxes. 

When you say appeal form do you mean an online form to zillow?  I'm hoping that you didn't buy the property as a primary residence and then immediately rent it out, but if you did then I wouldn't fill out the form. Not that I think it wil trigger a tax investigation but better to stay off the radar. 

I personally would just leave it. Maybe your tenants will be happy to be paying their rent on such an expensive property!

100% disagree on it being too difficult of a concept to explain.  Try this "I'm going to put your house under contract.  I'm then going to market it to my "buyers" list and one of them will hopefully buy it.  If no one buys it, I'll purchase your home for what is agreed in the contract"

P.S.  I think the real truth is more like "I'm going to give you a very very tiny amount of earnest money to tie up your house so you can't sell it to anyone else if you realize the real value of your property.  I'm then going to mark up the property and send it out to my buyers list.  If someone buys it, great day for all.  But if no one buys it, I won't because I don't have that amount of money, and will instead find a B.S. way to cancel the contract"

Let's just be real for one small moment and agree that's how the majority of beginners who wholesale operate.  I'm not anti wholesaler when it's done correct and I do think they provide a service.

@James Wise

From my understanding the applicant gave a hold deposit and then canceled the contract which according to the terms of the contract meant they forfeit the hold deposit.  The tenant then later came back and said we still want to live there, but at that point the contract has been canceled and the appropriate consequences apply.  At that point he can deny them housing as they are basically a new applicant with no contract as the last one was canceled.  At least that's what I'm am understanding from the timeline.  @Account Closed It's not petty to keep the deposit.  Deal with any large financial institution and put money down that is non refundable and then cancel your contract.  Do you think they are going to give you your money back because you canceled the contract?  Nope

@James Wise Doesn't sound like he has to according to his contract.

@Samuel Awosolu It doesn't matter that the tenant could use those funds to find something else.  They broke the contract, they suffer the losses associated with that.  If we all got our money back every time we had buyers remorse there would be no point of contracts.

@MarieChele Porter If the tenant was in dire need of a place to live then they shouldn't have signed a contract saying they would wait the 30 days to be vetted by the HOA.

I see the pity side of it towards the tenants, but they signed a contract and then decided to cancel twenty something days later.  There are costs that go to towards the OP due to the loss of rental income, why is nobody throwing him a pity party?  He didn't do anything wrong. 

@Account Closed Are you running a business with a website and all that advertises rental properties where people can leave reviews?  If so you could have a negative review, so compare that to how many positive reviews you've had and see if it's worth $860 to have a bad review.  If you're just renting a single property I wouldn't worry about it.  Show the old prospective tenants the contract and highlight why they aren't getting the hold money.  It's not exactly going to make headline news or tarnish your name because you stuck to a contract.

I really don't think you're in the wrong to keep it.  The applicant canceled the contract, not you.  Also I'm assuming you are missing out on rent during this time because now you will have to present a new applicant and wait another 30 days.  People bashing you because it's easy to say just give it back, it's another to do it.  By the way, how much money are we talking about?  And someone mentioned going to the media?  PLEASE.  The news isn't that slow these days.