After doing a ton of reading on this forum, I see you and several others are extremely skilled in this business, so your opinion carries a lot of weight.

great idea and way to bring it to the forefront -what this site offers is worth it's weight in gold.

We have a realtor that works the area that we live in and he drops off calendars and notepads with a picture of himself, a middle aged, over weight guy with a trumpet in his hands.

.), borrowers are part of the qualification process (up to 25% weight of the final decision is based upon the borrower's creditworthiness).

I’ve dealt with one bad tenant that did some dumb things like set an iron on new carpet in a bedroom, stained several spots in the living room, broke the lease and left early, etc… ended up keeping her security deposit so the damages were sort of evened out.

Figure out what rent is going for in the area where the real property is located.Figure out what type of loan payments you will need to meet the your investment initiative.Don't forget to count in maintenance.There is actually a formula that one of the other member put up. Keep

Houses need upkeep. a comp roof on a 1000sf house is around the same price. lets say that roof cost $2000, it doesnt make much sense to put a $2k roof on a house that cost $1k, in a market that you might never even get your purchase price back.

This lets you leverage your capital to do more deals.The refi for most investors is to get the lower rate locked in and get some cash back to invest again.If you run out of cash or have "trapped equity" and little cash left then you have to partner with other investors to do deals.I have seen it work sometimes but generally it is a mess unless you can do multiple deals with one partner instead of partnering with one investor for this project and another one for the next.The problem with partners is down the road they get different reasons for selling or exiting the property early.I don't see the refinance bank loaning up to 100% of current value and letting you pull out the 30% and get it back.What many investors do is take on a property with maintenance and vacancy issues using hard money.Fix the problems and then create a higher value for the property.In commercial the weight is given to the income approach.So if you had 50 unit building.Units rent for 500 a month but are 50% occupied.So currently 150,000 gross income yearly.Value roughly at a 10 cap at 750,000 going in.You get for 600,000 and put 150,000 in repairs fixing problems.Total funds needed is 750,000.HML says they will fund 525,000 and you put down 225,000.You work hard and get occupancy up over 6 months to 90%.270,000 gross rents with NOI around 135,000.New value at a 10 cap for refi is 1,350,000.Refi at 75% LTV would be 1,012,500.You get 262,500 back and then your original 225,000 you put down based on the new value.I hope I am making sense.

If you don't keep an eye on your property managers, they will do things like cut corners on upkeep to make profits look higher and then you will get stuck with a big money repair down the road.Maybe your better bet is commercial property with long term NNN leases.

So although way over-weighted in RE, I am only looking for better return on the balance of our holdings.