All Forum Posts by: Rebecca Belnap

@Douglas Larson Sandy has specifically said it doesn't allow airbnb, made the news as being one of the least friendly.  I do know that you can find lots of airbnb homes available there.  I have friends in Draper who have close to 100% occupancy most of the year and have had no trouble from the city.

@Nick C. has a good point. The local Reia's have people who are cash buyers, and also people who can get cash fast when needed.  @Jeff Rappaport runs a wholeselling class that meets once a month.  The next one is this Thursday at 7 at the Thai Siam Restaurant in Draper.  If you can make it, you will get a lot of your questions answered and get to network with a lot of investors.

Do you want a Realtor or a Broker? I'm not either, but since self promotion tends to get deleted, that's a good thing.  Two of the bigger pockets realtors that I have met and have worked with are @Jenny Wall @Josh Knox .

@Matias Pereyra Which bank?  I want to confirm that is possible but haven't found any bank that does a 5% down conventional loan on multifamily units.  If it's real, that is the next loan I'm doing.

Wish I could be there.  These are amazing

The FHA case number stays with the home, but not the appraisal unless it is a HUD home. I'm a loan officer and I have a closing today where a previous couple had an FHA appraisal but didn't get financing, but we had our own appraisal done. I wish we could have used the previous appraisal since it came in almost the same, but the other loan company took 2 weeks just to transfer the FHA ID number and when they said they didn't know how to transfer the appraisal, we just gave up and ordered.

Prices are still rising, but not quite as sharply as they were. The Fed raising the interest rate is having some affect, but also on my FHA loans, I'm seeing more people needing a co-borrower to qualify. I have no idea if the home is overpriced or not, but if you want to post the details about the address of the property (either here or Private message) I would give you my opinion.

@Cameron Eaton  The biggest problem you will run into is that your friend can't pay you more than $50 for any lead, and some brokerages won't even allow that.  Yes, if you want to find properties and resell them, the safest thing is to become a licenced Realtor.

It may not be the most profitable though.  There are ways to legally wholesale, but you need to leave the friend out of it.  As @Douglas Larson said, you wholesale the contract, not the house.  If you can get a seller to sign that you can buy a home for $150,000 and it is worth $200,000 with a bit of cleanup, you will make a lot more than your realtor friend.  If he tried to wholesale like that, it could be considered a conflict of interest and a code of ethics violation.

Good luck, I hope you find a fit that works for you.

@Matias Pereyra Was this on a single family or a multi-family?  The 5% down is a great way to go on a single.  You usually see 15% down on a duplex, and 25% down on a triplex or 4 plex.   Did they have a 2nd mortgage to go with it?

@JD Martin All of the water, sewer, and gas lines were installed in a trench at the same time at the back of the property 2 feet from the building and 4 feet from the property line.  On the property line was a fence and then the driveway for the 26plex next door on the other side.  We might have been able to dig a hole and find the gas line confirming where it was and removed the fence, The driveway for the neighboring unit went all the way around the property, so they could have used the West entrance for a day or 2.  But we didn't really know what we were doing, just that sewage was backing up into the apartment we were living in.  We got the idea to dig and we dug, I'm sure the smell of sewage affected the decision.  No trench box, we had the foundation of the apartments on the one side and the driveway stabilizing the other side pretty well.  A lot of clay in there, so we had nothing that even looked like it wanted to go anywhere.

@Taylor Chiu It's a 6 inch sort of mint green pipe heavy duty PVC meant specifically for sewage drain lines.  One end has the connection built in so you just push them together and they seal.  I can't remember if they were 20ft or 16 ft long.

About 20 years ago, we had to replace 75 ft of sewer line out to the street.  We used PPM and they did a good job.  It took forever because they had just replaced Provo's center street and wouldn't give us a permit to cut into it.  Fortunately, the apartment complex was on a corner and we got the permit to cut into the other street and create a new connection.  Can't remember the price, but I do remember thinking that the extra 20 feet in length to skip 20 feet of concrete and only have to cut through 10 feet of asfault was about $2000 less.

A few years later the pipe collapsed again further up in an area that hadn't been replaced yet.  That time, we called them to do a 60 foot section, but when blue stakes went out it turned out the entire section was installed directly under the gas line and it had to be hand dug.  They couldn't start for 2 weeks.  After 3 days of sewage backing up into the main floor apartments and having tenants put up in hotels, we gave up on the pros and started hand digging. 

The first 2 feet was no problem, had it done with 2 people in half a day.  After that the compacted dirt was like concrete.  At 4 feet, we found the gas main and were lucky we didn't hit it with the pickax.  After 4 days we were 6 feet down and had to fill buckets and hand them to the person up at the top.  On day 5, I collapsed in tears and swore that I now knew what Hell would be like and swore to mend whatever evil ways I have.  My husband called his sister and paid her to help with the rest. I got to be the person at the top pulling buckets up with a rope.  By the end of the day they had found the pipe at 7 feet down on one end and 9 at the other.  In the end, we spent about $500 in labor (not our own) and materials and swore that we would never do it again.

Not that the story helps much, but I thought I would share what can happen.  I didn't even know lining it was an option, but it sounds like a good solution if you can to it.  Just always make sure you get enough bids to know if you have a good price.  3 minimum, 5 is better.