All Forum Posts by: Brendan Conley

Hi Sathya, happy to see you're looking to get your first rental property! If you want to stay in the Middlesex County, Lowell is a great place to invest. Cash flow-able market with lots of upside as far as appreciation goes. Healthy tenant base and rental demand as well as two section 8 voucher providers in the city, CTI and LHA. I'm an investor and flipper in the city, and I work for a developer focused specifically in Lowell as well. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or would like to connect, and happy hunting!

No matter where you live, that is very high. I think $100/ hour for labor plus $50 for parts is fair.

Hi Chantell, and welcome to real estate investing! There were two things that helped me the absolute most.

1. Reading/listening to bigger pockets material (books, podcasts, etc). Educating yourself is of the utmost importance! 

2. Real estate is a people industry so networking is important. Local real estate investor meetups are a great place to introduce yourself, meet people in your market that you'll inevitably do business with, build a good team, and learn from guest speakers as well as the other meetup-goers.

Bonus advice: get started! Joining BP is a great step, but when you've educated yourself and have met some folks, start talking to lenders and find a good investor agent... and start submitting offers! Becoming a successful investor won't boil down to a single eureka moment. Every investor, big or small, started with their first deal! 

Welcome to the community and best of luck!

Hi Vincent! Looks like you've done well for yourself with your first investment. I would recommend you refinance instead. I suggest you read up on the BRRRR method (Bigger Pockets has a good book on exactly this). It's the idea of Buy - Rehab - Rent - *Refinance* - Repeat.

Selling your property would be a taxable event, too. When you cash out refi, you can use the money to improve the property and/or buy your next investment. And, since the cash would be debt (you got the money from a new loan), it's not taxable. You could sell and 1031 it into the next property but you'd usually have to time the sale of your existing property and the closing of your new property right.

I also wouldn't worry about having central air in the property unless that is essentially a requirement for you to remain competitive with the rest of that market. As long as the property is in good shape and is able to market itself in the event of a vacancy, then I think you've got a stable, good performing asset. 

Hope this helps!

An extremely overlooked method here is to open up listed rentals on zillow in your target market and call any landlords that don't appear to be listed as an agent or property management company. Many of them get frustrated trying to find tenants and fill vacancies and don't like answering maintenance calls. Try to find out what problems they might have and offer value in a solution!

It depends. If you know the neighborhood well and know it's not a neighborhood issue, it's most often just a result of poor management. High vacancy, lots of uncollected rent, high evictions, and long turnover times (as a result of slow turnover process or poor marketing/placement to fill vacancies) are very common results you'd expect from a bad property manager/landlord, which will lead to this "no tenants" issue. Usually these properties present the most opportunity though because you can quickly bring them up to par and rent them out for market rents (expediting your stabilization period) as opposed to waiting for turns to fix up and fill units. Unless its a perfectly turn key deal with market rate tenants, you'll actually have more control over a property upon closing with vacancies than if it had tenants. Hope this helps!

A great way to find a good team member (contractor, agent, partner, attorney, lender, PM, etc.) is at a local Real Estate Investor meetup. It'll be mostly investors there but most of them already have a great team that they'd be happy to refer you to!

Sorry to hear this happened to you. While screening tenants properly is not a guarantee to avoid this, it certainly is the best way to do it. Make sure you're performing credit checks, background checks, verifying income (calling employers and even checking bank statement if you need to), and calling former landlords to inquire about/confirm their habits as a tenant (cleanliness, respect for neighbors, paying rent on time, etc.).

If you don't think you're capable of this, definitely find a good property manager! Good PM's can be hard to find but the right one is always worth the money because you avoid headaches and your property will usually perform better than when it's self managed by someone without experience.

Hope this helps!

Really looking to upgrade to battery powered access control to be more efficient and cut costs during turnovers. What is everyone else out there using?