All Forum Posts by: Austin F.

Quote from @Joe S.:

Everybody wants to free load on churches as a charity.

Well when you don't pay taxes......

Agent wanted me to sign one like that to make an offer on a property, I asked them to make the contract specific to the property Location "1234 West St", and they did.

Tell them you won't sign it unless it has terms you are comfortable with, they either change it, or you move on. Lots of agents out there

Quote from @Kelsey Cole:

 *snip* You can price a home at whatever you want but that means nothing at the end of the day if it doesn’t sell. *snip*

Exactly. Make your offer, the worst they say is yes.

Before you do, go read "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss. Then go buy some stuff on Craigslist and practice your low balling. Negotiating is a game, and can be pretty fun if your used to playing it.

Fascinating, thank you for sharing 

Quote from @Steven Goldman:

Quote from @Austin F.:

Yes, I have one. As described above a local bank(!) has all my firsts, and was willing to put a second on all of them to extend a line of credit. After a year I asked to bump it up to 80% LTV and they did it without hesitation.
Current rate is 9.75%, interest only.

Did your LLC or you own the properties? Is it a fixed rate? Thanks,

I own them personally. The LOC is under the LLC.

Adjustable rate interest only

Yes, I have one. As described above a local bank(!) has all my firsts, and was willing to put a second on all of them to extend a line of credit. After a year I asked to bump it up to 80% LTV and they did it without hesitation.
Current rate is 9.75%, interest only.

Get a Credit Karma account, also Experian. Free, and useful resources; they will help you set goals and steer yourself in the right direction.

Where in MI are you located?

If the numbers aren't working they aren't working. Rural renting is more difficult than in the city, can you make changes to attract tenants, or was the underwriting bad from the start?

When I opened my HELOC my lender said I can "term it out" at any time. Basically close the line, then it turns into a 20 year loan at whatever rate at my current balance. Possibly ask your lender if there are options like that?


How much principal are you able to pay on the HELOC currently, can you increase that number?

Quote from @Trent Rogers:

Quote from @Austin F.:

In a similar situation I had very good success with direct mail. I sent out a similar number of mailers and was able to write a somewhat personal sounding letter, return address it with a local address, use stamps I stuck on myself, and make it look the opposite of a direct mailer. I had a very high response rate (16%+), and ended up buying a few deals because I took the extra time.

As a contrast I had run my list through a phone number generating service, and I checked what number the lead called me from against what the service said their number was, and only one or two were correct.

 Nice, thank you for the feedback! Did you print the mailers yourself? It seems most good mailer services have some minimum order (500) and I currently don't need that many. 

It's also interesting that so few numbers actually correlated to your skip tracing...what skip tracing service did you use?

Printed it all myself on my home printer. There is a way to do it where you can build your list in Excel, then export it into Word and it will auto fill names and addresses as it all prints. So you can click print, and it will rattle off 50 or however many of the same letter each with a different name printed in the "name" field. Same with envelopes for addresses. Once I figured out how to format my Excel doc the right way this was very easy, but it took a bit of research to get right.

I can't recall the name of the skip trace service I used, but it was highly recommended here.