All Forum Posts by: William Houstian

My roommate (44M) and I (25M) want to move out of our apartment and into a house. We are both employed in high-income jobs and are well kept and put together people. Good tenants.

However, I have heard landlords are wary of renting to 2 single males because of the stereotype of single male roommates being messy, partying etc. Is that true? Is there anything about our situation that would raise a red flag to you? And if so, what can we do to make the landlord comfortable and show him that we really are good tenants?

Thank you all.

@Jack P. @Peter Ulstad thank you for the info! I will explore lending options. I definitely want to do owner occupy with an FHA loan at 3.5% down on a property that I rent out come September, be it a triplex or just a SFH. After that though, I will either need to put down 20% on rentals or find a creative lending solution so I don't have to. With the latter option, I'm told it will be difficult to obtain without a proven track record. With the former, it looks like I would have to either buy cheap properties or flip houses to earn that money. That's where I'm at.

I have a full time job but I want to build a rental portfolio and become a cash flowing Real Estate Investor as quickly as reasonably possible. Currently I am renting an apartment until September of 2018. My plan now is to owner-occupy a house that I will buy at that time to get the benefit of not having to put down 20%. Then in a year I will repeat this, move to the new place, and rent out the old. This allows me to buy more properties as I will not need 20% down each time and will be buying them owner-occupied. The downside of this though is that I will only be able to acquire properties at the rate of one per year. I want to build my rental portfolio faster than that. The other options I see are to buy cheaper houses on which I can afford a 20% down payment, or to flip houses and use those profits as down payments on rentals. Once I own the first property I will be able to take out HELOC to potentially do this but I just want to know if this all makes sense and what options exist I may not be considering. Thanks. A lot of my plan centers around the fact that you need 20% down if you are not owner occupying. Are there ways around this?

I recently came across this flowchart of a call with a potential seller and I had a question about this particular section in it regarding the transfer of a mortgage. In the scenario, the seller's house currently has a mortgage on it, and they are not willing to allow me (the buyer) to take over the note. This results in the clarification question "You won't sell your house unless you get full asking price?" My question is, where does this conclusion get drawn? Why does them not wanting the buyer to take over payments of the mortgage result in the assumption that they are asking full price? If they did allow me to take over the note, wouldn't the price be the same (whatever the balance on the mortgage is)? Thanks, I was just confused by this and by the process of transferring a mortgage in general, and would greatly appreciate if somebody could explain it.