All Forum Posts by: Benjamin Pekarek

Wayne is right, either you'll need a seller holdback for that 30%, or you'll need to do a 60/40 and JV for that 40%.

As Nick Britton said, every tenant should have renter's insurance. We require all tenants to have renter's insurance - and yes, we do provide them with an option in house, or they're welcome to shop around. Aside from my commercial tenants, I've never had a tenant shop around - they're happy to satisfy our insurance requirements of $10,000 possessions, $100,000 damage, $100,000 liability without ever lifting a finger.

Tanya,

Depending on what you're looking for, we service Ft. Myers. Please shoot me a PM of what you're looking for (if you're uncomfortable posting in the open forum), and we'll see if we can help you. If we can't, odds are we know who can!

-Ben

Hey @Mark Ferguson,

I lump Brooksville down to Ft. Myers as one big zone. Good deals, and bad deals abound, but the people are for the most part of the same mindset, and you have A to C properties, you're hard pressed to find many D neighborhoods. Central Florida (the 98 & 27 corridors, Ft. Meade, Lake Wales, Avon Park, Sebring, etc.) have excellent cash flow, but are more C & D communities with C & D tenants. Jacksonville has come up over the years, but you have to either live there, or have someone you trust implicitly to invest there. Orlando goes from high end to garbage in the blink of an eye, and you have HOAs with restrictive covenants everywhere you look (Sarasota, our home base, is not much better), see Jacksonville. If you're referring to the Panhandle as "North Coast" (St. George Island, Santa Rosa Beach, Carrabelle, etc.) it's a great area for vacation rentals, but I personally wouldn't park my money there.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the dynamics of Pensacola to give an opinion, but the folks I've known over the years refer to Pensacola as eastern Alabama, not as a piece of Florida.

-Ben

Mark,

I'm an advocate of not getting tied to any properties. Period. From the basic numbers you've thrown out Greater Tampa & Central Florida would give you a much better ROI for the equity you have in play. My advice would be to buy one here and see if you like the dynamics here in Florida, then and only then would I take the plunge and move everything over. Otherwise, you run the risk of 1031 exchanging your full portfolio and hating the management style of your PM (not that you can't change PM companies), you don't like the towns and the people you get from them, or just plain hate long distance investing!

All that being said, the clients that I'm placing are doing 20/25% down, and seeing Cash on Cash ROI of 18-35%, the ones I'm finding after they purchase are seeing a CoC ROI of anywhere from 12-40%.

Call or PM me if you'd like my thoughts on my market. 

-Ben

Hello  @Alex Almonte!

Welcome to Bigger Pockets. As you've mentioned you're lenders, I'll warn you right now that everyone and their brother will be coming out of the woodwork asking you for money. To avoid that headache, I suggest adding your terms to your bio - otherwise that's all you'll be doing! 

Rebekah Gimenez with Trust Title does ALL of my closings within the state of Florida - best title company I've ever dealt with.

Civic Financial out of California did my last deal

And we work the entire state for investors, whether fix & flip, or buy/hold/lease.

-Ben

Your other option would be to find a seller interested in seller financing. 

@Terri Mooney, 

What kind of down payment do you have access to? Any HML are going to be looking for good credit, a sizeable downpayment, and experience. If you haven't done any deals before, I suggest you look at residential properties to build your experience up. Lenders like to see experience when you get into the realm of commercial properties.

-Ben

Zamir,

Depending on your needs, we charge an effective rate of 5%: 2.5% of gross lease value when we lease a unit, and 2.5% of what we collect every month.

However, we are 100% volume based - we work with multiple owners in multiple areas - we have a maintenance call center that takes calls 24/7, we have a team that can interact with tenants 24/7, but our owners might take up to 24 hours to get their exact answer. 

If that setup could work for you, please give us a call at your convenience.

-Ben