All Forum Posts by: Zack Bloom

Looking for on purchasing drywall and supplies for my units. Do you recommend financing through somewhere like Home Depot and their credit cards or finding other funding sources? 

I just had a great conversation with a major investor out of San Diego who does a lot of industrial real estate - basically leasing out warehouses to companies like Amazon. I was offered a chance to join his team, not seed capital down, to work on some of the property management and relationship in exchange for a 20% equity stake. Never been a huge sweat equity fan but it seems like a good opportunity, I'm just trying to get a grip on the differences b/w what I've been doing in residential rentals vs. industrial real estate.

@Jillian Sidoti thanks for your insight! I didn't realize how particular they were with choosing someone to fund. Definitely helpful, I guess it doesn't translate to making it easy like those kickstarter projects.

@Don Konipol interesting note about debt crowdfunding platforms, I haven't looked into those until now. I found a list of debt crowdfunding sites here. I've heard that Lending Club got in a lot of trouble recently, do you have any insight on that? Is it risky to use a platform like that for seed capital?

I agree with these options but I'd also add that you can fund your real estate project with different types of funding. Even if you do 20% if you are using an outside lender you can rehab the property and refinance it so you are actually putting in less than 20% of the value of the property. I'd recommend checking out this read: https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/brrrr-buyrehabrentrefinancerepeatprimer/

Hey @Account Closed I've actually had a similar experience here. I think people are quick to jump to hard money or the big banks but my dad and I have seen much better luck using community banks and unlocking credit cards we wouldn't normally go after. Seed Capital was really helpful with discovering the credit cards I could qualify for and I've been using mostly credit unions for business lines of credit because I found them to give the best rates.

I agree with @Account Closed on this one. I did some coding for a startup with a couple friends a while back and we used Quora a lot for technical coding questions and they had a strong community for those more technical questions similar to StackOverflow. While you might find a couple examples, I just joined the BP community here and it's an extremely active community for real estate questions. It's really incredible to see how helpful real estate investors on this site are, some that have been doing it for more than 20 years! I'd take the advice from a mentor on BP on something like finding seed capital a lot quicker than I would from someone on Quora.

A very interesting read on using equity crowdfunding for real estate investment capital - http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2.... Different from donation based crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, equity crowdfunding was only recently legalized by the 2012 JOBS Act that allows crowdfunding to be used for startups and ventures. 

Fundrise and RealtyMogul are some of the real-estate crowdfunding sites that popped up recently for funding real estate investing through crowdfunding. What are your thoughts? Would you use crowdfunding platforms for real estate seed capital?

I totally agree, $100/door is pretty arbitrary. What's worked for me is to look at an existing property I've had, do a worst-best case scenario based on things like that changed over the years then see if it does well enough that I can go without a tenant for 3 months without having to pull money from other properties.

I personally think you could do better with putting that money toward buying a reliable property for rental. The passive income and equity will serve you just as well for retirement. Plus you have access to the funds earlier without paying penalty.