All Forum Posts by: Peter Lampione

Glad to see I'm not the only one asking this @Jackson Long and @Elbert D..  I'm still researching, I might message you at some point to exchange notes if you are interested.

Peter

Thanks @Shane Odom, would love to chat, I will reach out to shortly.

One more thing, to your point Colin Murphy about connecting with a local investor friendly realtor, we are reaching out to people in the area, but if anyone has any recommendations on good realtors in the Tampa area let me know. Thanks again, Peter

Craig Curelop thanks for the suggestion, I had heard about that site but forgot about it. Michael Haynes thanks for the advice, appreciate it. I totally agree that we need people locally. My parents live in Bradenton, and my sister and brother in law are moving down there this summer and we plan on leveraging them (he is a contractor). We are just trying to get ahead of the game and learn some of the quantitative details you don't see when driving around and talking to people. Colin Murphy agree that we need boots on the ground. We are going to be in the Tampa area around Christmas and plan on doing a lot of on the ground research with my sister and brother in law. Our plan is to get our team figured out and learn as much as we can before they move there, and once they move we will start up. Understand there is no replacement for in person experience and knowledge, but the analytical side of me (I work in technology) can't help but try to analyze the situation. Will work it from both ends but probably need more of the in person experience to make the analysis practical. Appreciate all the great advice from everyone, Peter

I've searched existing questions about online tools for market research, but wanted to ask some specific questions as I haven't gotten them answered yet.

My wife and I are just starting out and doing research on markets in the Tampa Bay / Sarasota area.  It is a bit overwhelming as there are so many neighborhoods and we can't become experts in all of them.  To narrow it down we are starting by picking school districts, then we want to look at which neighborhoods have a decent amount of multi-family properties, and continue narrowing down through other criteria (rents vs prices, crime, jobs, population growth, services available, ...)  In addition to online analysis we will spend time in the neighborhoods during visits there, but for this post we are looking for advice about online tools, specifically:

• Is there a good online source to determine how many properties in a given area are multi-family?
• Is neighborhood scout worth paying for?  Is the info available from a paid membership not easily available elsewhere and worth the cost? 
• Is rent-o-meter worth paying for?
• Is greatschools.org the best option for researching schools?
• Looking at crimereports.com and crimemapping.com for crime data.  Have seen a few others, though they all seem to have similar data.  Any suggestions on which are best (most accurate) and how to best leverage them would be appreciated.
• We are using city-data.com, usa,com/rank, walkscore, bestplaces.net, statelocalgov.net, and Zillow to get some general information. Any other tools/services we should consider, or any of these you consider not worth it?

Thanks for any help you can provide, these forums have been really helpful for us as we are trying to learn the business.

Thanks,

Peter

@Adam L. Still early days for us (doing neighborhood analysis) but let us know if you have any advice/info on what you've found so far. Happy to keep you in the loop on any properties we find.

Yeah, we are exploring REI for cash flow purposes, not investment. We are looking to generate an income stream and hope to so so by leveraging, and are definitely looking for CoC returns higher than 10% which is a very tall order in the NYC/Long Island area.

Hi Llew. Thanks for your response. I think your spreadsheet shows the same results as my calculations. The difference between CoC between the 0% down case (5.71 CoC) and the 50% down case (5.01 CoC) is less than 1% according to your spreadsheets. This is the exact result I had found too. The dollar amount of cash flow is obviously very different, but as a percentage of what you invested it doesn't seem to be that different. I guess that metric is useful to me because I am looking at the opportunity cost of the money I invest (in that I would have to take it out of stock market investments to use cash to buy a property) so the difference in returns between borrowing and not borrowing is significant. I am using an ultra-conservative appreciation rate (basically 0) when I calculate the final ROI, but holding a property for 30 years still gives me a nice ROI. It's the Cash of Cash return that concerns me because the numbers don't jump that much when you get to the range of investing between 30% to 100% down for most properties, and it seems hard to find a property that gets anywhere close to a 10% CoC.

@Jeff B. @William E. thanks for your answers. You're right. We should definitely be looking to minimize expenses as much as possible. Thankfully between us we have a lot of bookkeeping and IT experience so there are some costs we are comfortable in not having to incur, however the bigger expenses such as lawyers and accountants seem unavoidable, and from what I hear it is pretty important to get your name out there quickly and effectively through an online presence and advertising so you can pick up deals earlier than others.  Lawyers and accountants themselves could really make one particular deal seem unprofitable, even though if you end up making 4 or 5 deals in the year the cost is obviously spread out. 

Do you factor in all these costs against your first property or do you assume you will be successful in acquiring others and only factor in a percentage of the costs on the first property?

I would reiterate a lot of the great advice listed. I am also just get started and learning. My suggestion from what has been working for us is: - first subscribe to the BP podcast and blog to keep up with the latest info as you do your research. And there are other good podcasts out there worth adding to you list. As you read and listen you will find additional learning resources. - go through the BP podcast backlog and listen to the episodes relevant to you. We got a great foundation from that. - read an introductory book, we read Brandon's 'The Book on Rental Property Investing', which gives an excellent overview of all aspects of the process. - once you have a decent grasp of the basics try creating a spreadsheet to calculate key metrics like cap rate, CoC, ... doing it yourself before leveraging tools will help you understand how they work, which is key. Then start looking at properties online and try estimating the metrics to get a feel for how they work. - go to local meet ups, there are great people there willing to help. That is my suggestion for learning, then you have to do your analysis and pick target markets, create business plan, and jump in! We are up to the market analysis step right now and hope to be ready to pull the trigger soon. Good luck! Peter