The guy I'm buying from is completely remodeling 3 of the four units, and I may be able to talk him into kicking the last lady out, who will be gone before closing anyways, and remodeling all 4.

This may be a long post, but I thought it would be good to walk through everything step-by-step, and explain my thinking along the way.If you want to stick with me through it all, here we go:I was not going to be getting a conventional mortgage for my first property for a number of reasons.First, I am still annoyed at the hoops I had to jump through to get a mortgage for my primary residence.Second, my liquid cash was on the lower end.Third, the properties that I would need to start out with would not be financeable anyway.Fourth, my DTI is on the high side, due to the decision that we made to take out a HELOC to complete interior improvements on my primary house.So, I decided that my path was going to be to form a single member LLC, and take a loan from my 401(k) at work to finance the down payment.Since I do not view the 401(k) loan as a long-term solution, I am treating like hard money, and pay it off ASAP.So, my first deal would be a flip, or a rental that was such a good deal, that I could re-fi out and pull all my cash out.I decided to reach out to the commercial lending department of the local credit union, which I am a member.The person I talked to (who became my lender) is fantastic.I told him what types of properties I was looking for, and that I’d look to turn them into rentals, or to flip them.I will never forget his response, which reminded me why I love this credit union.He said:“Typically, the deals you are talking about are much smaller than the deals we like to do.However, we also realize that you can not get to that level unless someone helps you get there.So, if the numbers make sense, we will see if any of our products fit.”Awesome!

Stop wasting money on direct mail and let's get you into a deal so you feel like you are getting somewhere.Feel free to PM or email me if you don't want to talk here in the forum!

I'm going to keep this page open for my talking points when I talk to my realtor.

I like Kansas City and Missouri in general, but I am still looking around.I am really looking for people in Seattle to talk to about investing away from our home town, what works, what doesn't, what questions should I be asking about these properties, etc.Thanks for reading and really excited about being a part of the community.Russ

With one of them, who applied, it ended up with him asking me to prove I owned the property and going over the lease with a fine-toothed comb (after he missed a couple of deadlines to get things back to me, I moved on and denied him).I figured the facts that 1) prospective tenants see the property and can talk with the current tenants to ask about the property and me, and 2) that they have to submit an application and go through a credit and background check, and 3) that I was using Cozy to collect payments and 4) that I am available by phone, email and text whenever they want, would be enough to make people comfortable that they are not getting scammed, but it was apparently not enough for some people.Does anyone have any tips to help prospective tenants feel more comfortable dealing with you from afar and not feeling like they are getting scammed?

I was working on verifying while talking here as well . . .

Is anyone still available to talk about Single Family homes in Inglewood?

One month is a pretty fast turnabout on that much of an increase, unless we're talking $2k-$2300.

We've discussed it with a few prospective tenants and they seemed genuinely happy about the suggestion.If you want your landlord to start reporting your payments to help build/solidify your credit, I think you should talk to them and see what options they can come up with.