Perhaps a silly question but Newbie needs advice
Hello all, thank you for taking the time to read this. Here is my issue in a nutshell. I am new to real estate investing and am currently on my path to getting my finances in order so that I can position myself to be able to invest and to get rid of some bad money habits. As I go through this journey I have also decided to educate myself in real estate investment so that I can be best prepared for July 2020, this is the point when I will be debt-free and will be shifting all my energy to actively investing in real estate utilizing the BRRR method.
To that end, I have made it a goal to analyze 2 properties per day so I can become familiar with my area and become comfortable analyzing properties...and that is where my issue is. I live in Corpus Christi, Tx. As you may know, Texas is one of several states that is a non-disclosure state meaning that real estate sales prices do not have to be disclosed and most often are not. Yesterday was my 1st day of analyzing properties and the problems I am coming across are as follows:
1.) My current source of data is Zillow, Redfin, and realtor.com. In digging through the bigger pockets forum I have found that the delta between the actual sales price and what these 3rd party websites list or state can be very high. I will not be in a position to start putting in offers, etc. and I don't want to waste the time of a busy professional (realtor) by constantly asking for comps for what in essence is homework for preparation. Is there any value in continuing to analyze properties utilizing the values on these websites until such time as I am not wasting a realtor's time, just to get used to the process?
2.) From my research, the average closing cost of a single-family home in Texas is between 0.98% to 1.31% of the final home sales price. Does this seem like an accurate amount? I have been using 1.25% on my calculations
3.) In the BP BRRR calculator, the 1st section in regards to loan details is the purchase loan details, this is self-explanatory enough, but what I noticed was the section of it (required section) asking "Amortized over how many years". The question I have is, can you not use a hard money lender for a BRRR? The reason I ask this is that one of my goals was to reach out to a hard money lender and find out more about it (I don't know if I can mention the gentleman's name or business name and don't want to violate forum rules so I will just call him HM). From what HM told me, in addition to the points that his company charges (Each point is 1% of the loan amount), and the interest rates that you deal with when going hard money, the length of the loans are 6 months and 12 months, there is no multi-year loan. All that being said, do I just put 1 year in that cell? Is hard money not an option for a BRRR?
Any help and advice with this would be greatly appreciated, I really want to meet my goal of analyzing 2 properties a day.