Buying my first single family home with two friends

[Ethan Daniel Dacar]

This is my first post and it’s going to be a long one, looking for some advice on the next steps I should take.

Myself and two friends are looking to buy a home to live in for a few years, fix it up, and eventually turn into a rental. the three of us are living with our parents so we’ve had time to save up money, $21,000 between all of us. We have been working with an agent/mortgage broker and we were approved for a loan up to $500,000 until one of my friends had some late payment that ruined his credit. Unfortunately with only myself and my other friend we only got approved for a $300,000 mortgage loan, We’re in the Seattle market so it’s extremely hard to find a property at that price.

My friends credit could take 6 months to a year to return to what it was and we don’t want to wait that long, we have money saved and we want to get our first property under our belts. I’m currently reading David Greene’s brrrr book and I think this is an option we’d like to go with because of all of the benefits you get over buying a home the traditional way. But we’re not sure if you can brrrr with three people with one having bad credit.

If you have any suggestions please let me know, Thank you.

[Michael Haas]

Hi Ethan - you mentioned doing a BRRRR - were you thinking of a 203K rehab loan? Does anyone on your team have rehab / construction experience?

I'm in Seattle as well, and in our market BRRRRs are typically bought with cash (private money or hard money) then refinanced into a traditional bank loan after renovations are complete. Most of the properties that will qualify for conventional loans (aka "cosmetic fixers") won't have enough margin/upside in them for you to pull most of your money out with a BRRRR, so you may not be able to do the "repeat" part as quickly as you'd like :).

As @John Barrett has already mentioned, given your experience level and financial situation a house-hack would be a far better first investment for you. Let me know if you'd like to grab a coffee and chat about that more, we house-hacked most of our portfolio of rentals and are a huge fan of the strategy!

Cheers and Best of Luck!