All Forum Posts by: Ben Rutkevitz

thank you @barbara 

@Barbara G., where on BP would I post about the ongoing progress?

Thank you Mark and Pancham! 

@Pancham G.

@Mark Redmann

Very excited to make that I made money post!!

@Phil Sabella, Welcome to the community!

You will find local helpful and supportive people here. Learn from the forum threads and blogs and go to local meetups to talk to people face to face. Good luck and enjoy, I hear great things about the Philly market. I am from NYC and Philly is on my short list of areas to get involved in. 

Dear Bigger Pockets Community, 

Thank you! Thank you all very much for all the help and support. Thank you for all the blog posts, forum threads and all the great people I met at the meetups. 

After years of researching real estate investing, I finally did it! I pulled the trigger and bought my first property. 

The feeling is great! I went from being on the sidelines to actually being a real estate investor. 

The story:

I met my JV partner at a local real estate meetup in April 2015. He had put a property under contract in Stratford, CT for $67,000. He found a hard money lender who was offering to lend funds for the purchase and rehab as long as the borrower could bring $30,000 to the deal. My JV partner had some of the funds but not all.

We discussed the details of the deal at the meetup and I liked what I heard. More importantly, I found my future JV partner very trustworthy.

Two days later I went to see the property for myself. 

It is a single family home, 1100 SF, 3 bedrooms, 1 bath that needed about $30k in repairs. Appraiser stated that the after repair value of the home was $185k. My thoughts were that there seemed to be enough room in this deal that even with me making newbie mistakes, I would not lose my pants. 

My partner also had a local mentor who recommended us a contractor who is very experienced in investor rehabs. We are in week 4 of the rehab process and things are going well and staying within budget. I have been blogging about the experience (link in my signature).

This community, website and forum gave me the base knowledge to have enough confidence to move forward and do my first deal. 

I am so inspired to explore this path of real estate investments and am actively looking for my next transaction. 

I would be happy to answer any and all questions you all may have.

With my deepest gratitude, Ben

@Brett Hoover, it may very well be that the Atlanta market does not support the returns you are looking for. I live in Manhattan, NY and the 1% rule hasn't been in effect here for a long time. What I did was go one hour outside of the city to find my first deal. I refused to buy a property that didn't cash flow just because of historical appreciation. Keep at it!

@Account Closed, regarding your question about local rents. There are softwares that can help you with that, and the low tech approach is to check Craigslist for your area. 

Hi Randy, Welcome to the community!

Welcome to the community Jay. I will be attending a real estate meetup in NJ on Tuesday, http://www.meetup.com/Real-Estate-Investors-Creative-Entrepreneurs/ I would be happy to meet you and share with you my experience. I'm also a cash investor interested in JV'ing on good deals.

I think what @James Wise is saying is that FHA will not let the down payment be from a loan, they will want the down payment funds to be yours. What you may be able to do is get a HELOC on your current rental property (may require some seasoning time) and use that for the down payment. I am not an expert on FHA loans so am just brainstorming with you, please confirm with some of the veterans on this site.

Congratulations @Maura Paler! those sound like great numbers and like a fun project.