Would like to buy my first property for using BRRRR method

Question

Hey I’m 21 years old I live in Hollywood Florida I saved so far $30,000 and I searched up how to get in to real estate and start buying my first property

I heard about the popular method called BRRRR I saw YouTube videos and read a lot about it on google and it’s interested and it’s maybe work for me

But in most cases I saw in the videos people rent them after the renovation

In my case I have to get an FHA loan and this require to leave there for at least 12 months before I can rent is for someone else and make some cash flow

Is there any better ways to do that or any recommends for newbie like new ? ;)

Thank you !

Matt Ternullo · Answer

In all cases of a BRRRR people rent them after the renovation, that's one of the R's.

Recommendation 1: Look at a 3 or 4 family that you could get an FHA loan on and rent out while living in one of the units. It will likely be tough to do a BRRR if you only have 3.5% down because either it needs too much work to get approved for an FHA (unless you do an FHA 203k) or it wont need enough for to appraise high enough get your money out.

Recommendation 2: Find a hard money lender that will cover a down payment in a second mortgage position and get a 20-30% down fix and flip loan. This is risky however because if you don't get that cash out your paying a high interest rate.

Danny Mittler · Answer

Bro you changed all my mind thank you soo much and I agree with you, I’ll defiantly will stay with the FHA loan, live in one unit try to save more money this year and maybe next year buy another one ..

Slowly slowly ..

Seth Hochberg · Answer

Congrats on having 30k saved up! The BRRRR method is indeed wonderful, but takes some experience to perfect. How do you get experience? Well by doing it. The tricky part is that you need some sort of safety cushion. In my mind, that comes in two flavors - either you have a larger capital cushion (by having a lot more capital) OR you have a mentor who's really invested in walking you through the process. As @Matt Ternullo suggested, you have two options: to do an FHA loan (which is not really going to be a BRRR) or to use a Hard Money Loan to BRRRR. I would really recommend the former. I know BRRRR'ing is the sexy thing to do in real estate these days, but since you're young and starting out, I think they key is to scale up your savings/earnings each month. The FHA route is much safer and a good bet to start off with, than BRRRRing your first property with only 30k saved up. Let me illustrate with examples.

1) FHA LOAN: With an FHA loan, any American can buy a home for only 3 or 3.5% down (I forget).  I don't know how expensive homes are in your market, but that means your 30k can buy ~1M dollars worth of property. Say you do this to buy a triplex or quadplex, and live in the worst unit and rent out the other two/three. Now you should be making some money each month AND be living rent free. If you factor in the rent you're saving, this is a fantastic investment. This might mean going from paying $1500 in rent to living rent free and making $500 a month after expenses (completely spitballing the numbers here). Now that $2000 extra a month (or 24k a year) is yours forever. Even if you mess a bunch of steps up, you're still going to wind up on top. If you do it right, you should have your investment back within the year. Now that you've escalated your savings, you've set yourself a solid foundation to start trying the BRRRR method. OR you might think that since that was so easy, after a year you might do it again! This is a very viable house-hack strategy that I would recommend fully to anyone with some savings (but not a lot, like 100k-200k).

2) BRRRR with HML LOAN: Unless you can borrow money from friends/family, your option here is to get a Hard Money Loan (HML). They will require you put down 25% of down payment. So that leaves you looking for 100k homes. Where I invest, in Baltimore, this is perfectly fine. However, I doubt that will work in Florida. but let's say it does. You spend 30k and you buy a 100k property that needs 50k of work. The HML lends you 70k for the house and 50k for renovation. Let's say the project stays under budget, but the appraisal comes low. You need the appraisal to hit 200k to get your investment back. But if it comes in at 160k, you won't even be able to pay back the HML in full (and you've lost the entire 30k by "leaving it in the deal". I don't know how easily you can save another 30k - that's the issue. You're making maybe $200 extra per month in cash flow, but you lost your valuable asset - the 30k in capital. Even if you pay off the entire HML but leave 15k in the deal, you've lost 15k of capital, but gained only $200 in cash flow per month. The whole exciting part of BRRRR is that you can repeat the deals with high velocity. If you are starting out with relatively little, any time you leave a bit of money in the deal, it completely undermines the speed at which you can BRRRR.

I would strongly encourage the FHA route to build a strong foundation. So that if you do decide to BRRRR, and you lose money, at least you can quickly recoup your investment from the rent of the home you originally house-hacked.

Hope this helps! Again 30k is much more than I had at 21 years old, and it's a great starting point. The BRRRR is a great tool, but try not to get drawn into all the hype. Real estate should be a get rich slowly method.

Hope that helps. =)