All Forum Posts by: Alvin Sylvain

I believe you are correct about the legality of sending messages to cellphones, but who's going to go arrest them? It's like that National Do Not Call Registry that more and more telemarketing companies are ignoring. Besides, what's the penalty? On those rare occasions somebody gets busted, it's probably worth whatever the piddly penalty is.

I don't know any reliable way to get calls to actually STOP once they've started, but you might consider getting a new phone with a new number, and don't publish that number. Have it un-listed, don't give it out to agents, lenders, the county court, or even the Yellow Pages.

If you need a phone number to get a Rewards Card at your local Grocery Store or some such, give them the Old Number. They're probably never going to call anyway, but there is a very good chance they'll sell that information.

At this point, your current phone number has somewhere, somehow, been associated with your name. And your name is associated with your rentals through the public records. It doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together, then start bugging you with sales calls. So, put that old phone in a drawer with the ringer turned off, and check it once a week in case, oh, some old high school buddy was trying to look you up. But otherwise, exclusively use your new phone for all your daily business and family affairs.

Yah, OK, that'll cost you some money to have two phones instead of one. But I'll bet it's cheaper than setting up an LLC and changing the legal ownership of your rentals. (and it's still tax deductible)

As I understand it, so long as the credit inquiries are for the purposes of purchasing real estate, it is understood that one might easily pull multiple times from multiple lenders over the course of several months, and so therefore your credit score should remain unaffected.

I expect the same can not be said for, say, multiple inquiries for opening credit cards.

Take that with a grain of salt, it's what a lender told me, and obviously they want my business.

Roughly 30 years ago, my wife and I bought a HUD foreclosure. We tried selling it through the agent that helped us buy it. They brought prospect after prospect, none of whom panned out, and the prospects started getting few and far between.

So about a year or so into it, we said "screw it" and put an ad in the local throwaway paper ourselves. We got dozens of calls, quite a few who came to look at it, and two offers.

We mentioned to the agents that we were selling it ourselves, and they were surprised at the response we got. How did we generate so much interest? they wanted to know. So we told them.

You could see a light come on -- advertise! in the newspaper! Whoa!

Lesson learned -- if you get an agent, or probably any other specialist, make sure they know more about the subject matter than you do.

You know, I don't think enough people voted for this posting! :-)

One thing that might work is a 203K loan for the purposes of making improvements to the property. Or just a regular Equity Line of Credit using the property (not your personal home) as collateral. Or just a 2nd or 3rd loan against the property.

Issues with this are legion:

1) For a 203K loan, you actually do need to use the money for property improvements, as they may audit you to make sure you aren't just scamming the system to get another loan. However, in my one time getting an improvement loan, many years ago, I just needed to show the improvements already in progress or completed, and the auditor was satisfied.

2) This is a new loan against the property, not necessarily with a favorable interest rate, so you're going to kinda hope the rental income covers at least most of the additional debt service.

3) See your tax professional, but my understanding is that interest payments are not quite as deductible as they once were, so it won't be quite as beneficial against high taxable earnings.

4) I believe the 203K loan is not available to apartment buildings with more than 4 units. However, I'm sure a little research would turn something else up, certainly at least a 2nd from private investors.

BUT -- and work your numbers carefully or this may be useless -- if the numbers work out, it'll be just like starting over from scratch. You'll have some cash available for investing again, and no passive cash-flow (absorbed into new debt service). Not quite starting over, of course, since you will also still have your first RE Investment!

What's on the lease? You should have a signed contract stipulating the total rent, what portion the govt pays, and the portion you pay.

Is it a month-to-month lease? What I used to do was have a 12 month lease that automatically converted to a month-to-month lease at the end of the 12 months. In most jurisdictions, the landlord is free to increase the rent on a month-to-month lease with some advance notice. I'm sure Section 8 is no different, altho I have no idea how that works with the govt portion.

I've never done Section 8, but if I'm allowed to raise the rent for a regular month-to-month lease, I can't see how the Section 8 would be any different.

Every time I tried some novel way to teach my kids something, I ended up falling flat.

E.g., I once made up a little game so I could teach the kids how, when you're gambling, The House Always Wins. So don't waste your money gambling.

Well guess what -- THEY WON.

"Oh! Daddy! that game is fun! let's play again! Double or nothing this time?"

Lousy lesson that turned out to be.

This sounds way too detailed to be merely hypothetical.

But anyhows, to answer the question, I'd have to say BOTH. Yes, it would push me away AND make me stronger. But I wouldn't stay away forever. Eventually, you have to recognize that, yes, there a lot of bad people out there waiting to ambush you for whatever you've got, but there's a lot of good people too. Odds are reasonable that if you try to accomplish anything in life, you're going to meet a good cross section of both.

So, it's made you stronger -- you sit back for a while, lick your wounds, cry into your beer, rebuild your asset base, then get back into the fray. More cautious next time -- maybe get TWO references, no matter how great the ONE was -- get a copy of the contractor's license and bond (what? no license? tsk tsk tsk) -- consult an attorney perhaps about writing a better statement of work (and even there, guess what? You need to TRUST your attorney!)

Then consider that if this is your first time out, and your luck is already horrible, hell, now you got no place to go but UP.

Research Private Lenders. They are non-banking investors looking for someplace to invest their money. They don't need to follow the federal rules. They just want a reasonable ROI.

I believe there is a link here on BP where you can connect with some number of them. I think you can also find them on Google. Search "private investors in {my area}".

Of course, you need to be careful. It's not Bank of America, after all. Some dude who seems too good to be true maybe is running a con.

The interest rate isn't likely to be close to market either, so you'll need to find a deal where you can still profit on 8-10% interest rates. Or at least something that won't kill you for two years, then refinance with a conventional lender.

If they're under 30, male or female, you could start off, "Dudes!"