All Forum Posts by: Zachary Lunden

I purchased my first house about a year ago and am trying to figure out how to finance my second purchase. 

My plan so far has been to find a multi-family property that the owner will consider carrying the note on and take the equity out of my current home with a HELOC and use that as a down payment and have them carry a note.

I have been talking to a local credit union that preliminary told me that they would be able to provide me with a HELOC of about $140k @ 4.5% variable.

A few questions for the community:

1) How have you structured seller financed deals in the past? Is it reasonable to think that a seller would go for a 20% down and carry a 3 year note with prime + 2 interest only note with a balloon payment? 

2) Do you have any recommendations on how to structure the deal?

3) Ideally I would like to refinance the property into a 30 year fixed (if it is 4 units or less) or a commercial loan as soon as possible. How do banks look at this? I would like to be able to refinance and pay off the owner and as much of my HELOC as possible (most of the properties I am looking at have value added potential).

I bought a home in Seattle last year, and am looking to do an addition. I need an architect that is familiar with the Seattle Land Use code to help me maximize the buildable square footage of my addition. 

The home is on a small lot, but has some room to grow, and zoning allows structures up to 40' high. 

I have had trouble getting any architects to talk to me (they are all slammed right now, and keep telling me they will get back to me in a month or two when they get new staff hired to help, but no such luck. Any references would be appreciated! Thanks!

Thanks Eric! 

I have been looking at modular. The problem is that I am on a very tight urban site. I just met with a guy that is starting a company that is going to build modular containers for multi-family projects (BlokAble is the company name). It would be tricky getting a mobile crane big enough to hit my side yard (due to buildings in front of me to the ROW). But it is definitely in play as an option. 

I would really like to hear from some folk that have done similar work in Seattle (inside city limits), as their permitting and requirements seem to be a bit of a maze. I am trying to take as much guesswork out of this as possible. 

Thanks JD.  Yes I am pretty near the footer, and I absolutely will need to either extend the foundation wall, or step in and go down. I am pretty certain that there is no bedrock in my area, but I understand this is a substantial project. However, that space built out as a bedroom would rent for $1,000/mo easily, so depending on the extent of the difficult and resulting expense of the project it there is still a good chance it is worth the time and effort. 

I bought a house in the Central District of Seattle last summer. Half of the footprint has a finished basement and the other half (400 sf) is a 4' crawl space. I would like to dig it out and turn it into a finished bedroom to rent out. I am also interested in adding on to the side of the house to add square footage and additional bedrooms/bath).

I am interested in doing as much of the work as I can myself (part of the reason I bought the house), but I don't exactly know how to go about getting permits and who to use for any design (arch/engineer) that might be needed in order to get the permits. Does anyone have any helpful feedback? Maybe you have done something similar and could help guide me to the path of least resistance? Or maybe you have worked with an arch/engineer that isn't going to kill my budget? I could/will do most of the designing in Revit, but I might need help figuring out my constraints. 

Thanks in advance for any advice!

My dad is currently looking at selling a house he inherited. He has been renting this house out for a few years now and is ready to sell. He wants to do a 1031 exchange to roll this into a new property. I have two questions:

1) Could he use a 1031 exchange to sell this single family rental home and use the proceeds from it to purchase modular rental units (Honomobo) that he would place on property that I own? (we would be open to any creative ownership structure that would allow this type of arrangement). 

2) Provided #1 isn't feasible, could he use a 1031 exchange to buy another rental property with him and I acting as co-owners through an LLC?

Thank you!