Shifting from SFH's to MFH advice needed.

[Chad Clark]

I'm in an odd spot. I have a few SFH's that make good money and have a good amount of equity in them. I can tap around 200k if I needed it, without hurting myself too much. Im to that point where I'm realizing that multi family apartments are where the real money is. Being able to rely on the NOI instead of comparables to gauge value is really appealing. I have near perfect credit (over 800) and a ton of history of running them myself with no issues.

So how do you get funding for these?   Do people actually use SBA loans for it?   Grants?   Am I in a good enough position to build one?   I'm thinking of building a smaller one to test out the idea, but open to bigger.    I figured with a couple hundred k in cash to plop down I should be able to get into something.   I'm just not sure where to start since I can't use my normal mortgage brokers as they don't deal with large commercial level stuff.   Anyone who's done this like to lay out a basic skeleton of where I should be headed?   The area has a ton of demand for it so vacancy isn't going to be an issue.  

[Jill F.]

We use a regional bank, Main Street Bank (formerly Wayne Savings). MSB does portfolio loans where they set their own lending criteria and hold and service their own loans (dscr req 1.2). They like to lend to mom-and-pop local investors and they hold the notes on 21 of our properties that include 61 of our 78 units. We have worked with them for the last 9 years.