All Forum Posts by: Annchen Knodt

there is a lot to learn with wholesaling, since to do it well you need to be good at estimating ARV and rehab costs, and you also need to be good at negotiating with potential sellers. Additionally you need to be committed to putting consistent effort and dollars into marketing, even early on when you might not see results, so it can be easy to give up! Lots of people of course have been successful with it though, and there are so many resources on the site (podcasts, blog posts, threads, etc) that you can search and learn from.

I highly recommend doing everything you can to connect with other investors in your area (or the area you are looking to invest in) to learn what works THERE - go to meetups, join local facebook groups, etc.  Ideally you can volunteer / partner with someone with experience and greatly speed up your learning process.   I see your from Norfolk - is that where you're wanting to start out?  If not you could mention the area and probably get more responses from locals.

Your wife may be interested in joining the PowerHouse Women facebook group - they are all about helping women learn together by bringing in mentors with experience, and I think they are starting up a group for wholesaling next year.  A lot of the women are in the DMV area so not too far from you.

since it isn't far away i'd highly recommend attending as many meetups as you can to connect with other investors in the area!  there are probably lots of virtual meetups as well. you can find them on here or also meetup.com for starters.  and be sure to set up keyword alerts on here for philadelphia so that you get notified of any new relevant discussions! (there's likely also plenty of existing threads with great insights that you can search for as well)  Good luck!

check out the BP fileplace, looks like there are quite a few flipping spreadsheets on there: https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

Has he tried smaller local banks? Just wondering since "every major bank or lender" seems to suggest maybe not. I had the same experience where a giant national lender was pushing the refi hard (and with crappy terms!!), but a smaller local bank was happy to do a HELOC for me (after talking to me about my goals for it and very thoroughly explaining the downsides of a HELOC, which I appreciated). I'm in Maryland not WA though so don't know any banks in that area.

I'm thankful to have discovered the opportunities that real estate investing offers - to be able to improve my own life and make an impact on my community.  And being able to connect with investors who are amazing humans doing incredible things to make the world a better place has gotten me so motivated, inspired, and excited about getting up everyday.  I don't think I could ask for more!

Hi @Adam Stitt, I just did some looking into this myself and here are my notes:

• It’s fairly common for investors to have an informal “letter of intent” to draft the initial sale agreement with the seller. This is good especially if the full-blown contract might initially be intimidating to the seller. There are probably lots of these on the bigger pockets fileplace, but I downloaded the one here
• Common advice for the full purchase agreement is to just download one for your state online, or get it from an agent, investor, attorney, or title company. Probably the best thing to do is identify who you want to use for the closing and give them a call

Helpful reading:

• It’s worthwhile to check out Brandon Turner’s quick guide to making an offer on an off-market property: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/offer-on-off-market-property
• This is a helpful thread discussing letters of intent
• this thread says get a FSBO contract from title company, which is the standard contract with agent stuff stripped out, so that might be a good approach to take

You won't really be able to analyze it until the owner responds to your mailer and you are able to walk the property with them.  What people do is send mailers to properties that are potentially promising (out-of-state owners, high equity / long-time ownership, or appear vacant when driving by), and then for the small percentage that respond, they are able to see and fully analyze the property.  

Some investors with lots of experience / risk tolerance / cushions are able to make decisions about properties without seeing the inside - this is more common with houses being sold at auction for example.  But definitely not something to do starting out!!

Thanks for sharing your story, and congrats on hitting your goal early!

Hi @Marlo Boutte, I'm interested in learning more about this as well, so wanted to ask whether you've learned any more about shared housing / recovery housing since you posted this?  I learned about the concept recently on a Real Estate Guys Podcast with Frank and Sherri Candelario who have started the Shared Housing Academy (now Recovery Housing Academy) to educate others on how it works.  I'm hoping to connect with other investors who have experience with the model to learn more!

Haha - hello from a fellow lover of free money from credit cards!  I guess I don't think of it as an investment as much since you're not putting any money in - it's just free money!  The I suppose the cash back and sign up bonuses are a return on the very small amount of time it takes to track them.