Seller is offering 5% interest only financing with a balloon payment at the end of 3 years with ~1/3 of purchase price down.

I recently purchased a property in Cleveland.

If you need help, I would attend SJREIA or whatever equivalent there is in central Jersey as well.2) I would suggest buying a property (SFH or MH) in a location you can get you within 30 minutes, especially for your first deal.

I've had a conundrum the last few years since I bought my first primary residence, I was lucky to get a good interest rate <5% When I purchased this property I was very green and new to real estate but I had heard or seen somewhere on some financial blog or podcast that if you pay an extra $100/mo toward your mortgage in many cases you can accelerate your payoff date 5+ years.

Bonus depreciation is just a special part of the US tax code.It allows you to take accelerated depreciation on portions of your property depending on when an asset is put into service.At the time of this writing, you can write off a huge portion (60% in 2024) of many qualified components that have a useful lifespan of 15 years or less.That means a certain percentage of things like landscaping, sidewalks, latches, appliances, fences, certain flooring, etc is depreciable in year 1.The bonus depreciation rate percentage changes yearly depending on the administration and the tax code.For years 2015 through 2017 first-year depreciation for all the items on a 15-year schedule or less was set to 50%.It was scheduled to go down to 40% in 2018 and 30% in 2019 and then 0% in 2020.But then Trump got elected, and he enacted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.That moved the bonus depreciation percentage to 100% from 2017 to 2022.In 2023 it went down to 80% and it’s currently at 60%.Depending on who gets elected again, 100% may be back on the table.Only time will tell.We know that the US government wants to incentivize more development and ownership of RE.They want Americans to continue to build and maintain our physical world.That’s why real estate is one of the most tax-advantaged assets in the US.Depreciation and bonus depreciation for RE are very positive and will likely continue in the years ahead.

not sure I know exactly what those mean yet except to say I'm looking for more long term equity to have better tenants/houses than better short term cash flow with lower tier properties.  

The sad part is that these poor returns don't even have to do with financing costs which will be an issue in the future this is simply poor performance by inexperienced operators.

Do Buyers Agents intuitively know when a property is priced to generate interest and the price is not even close to what the seller is looking for?

How would one go about getting a loan to take on the properties?

I renovated every single inch of this property.