All Forum Posts by: Ben Wagner

Getting tenants out these days is tough - cash for keys is probably the owner's best option if he's looking to do anything quickly. However, you should make sure you have a signed contract with the seller because once the tenants are out and the property is painted he may be looking for a higher price.

Hey Michael, cash-flowing properties on Long Island are pretty tough with the high prices and high taxes like you mentioned. There are select areas out east with lower pricepoints and taxes, but it's very competitive because there are so few viable areas and everyone is looking to buy in the few places that work.

We used to be able to buy dozens of flips a year off the MLS but that's gotten a lot harder in recent years. We now do 100% of our deals through a large direct-to-seller marketing budget. However, as someone starting out, I think you can find success by doing the things that don't scale for a larger company like us. One of the best options I think is door knocking. The prominent venture capitalist, Paul Graham, wrote an great essay on the topic of startups doing things that don't scale - http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

You may want to reach out to some wholesalers who have off market deals - I'll pm you.

I wouldn't recommend buying a tenant occupied home unless you are more experienced - especially right now during the eviction moritorium.

There are only a couple of places on Long Island you can buy a house for under $100k if you get lucky and are dealing directly with the seller. But any home at that price point is going to need a full gut job - there are no houses where you'll be all in, including purchase, carrying, and construction on Long Island under $100k, so I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

@William Merone if you find someone better I'd love to know. We've never used CP, but have heard good things. We do all the permitting work ourselves, but Oyster Bay is tough.

You can try Charles Weinraub's Captain Permit

Originally posted by @Jim K.:

The way we now deal with vacant properties is that we have a Simplisafe alarm system with battery backup and cellular capacity, as well as a Night Owl multicamera/DVR system. It's about $300 one-time cost for the alarm system, $300 one-time cost for the camera system, 15 bucks a month for Simplisafe monitoring. You can take the two systems from one vacant property to the next and turn the Simplisafe monitoring off when you don't need it.

I should mention we didn't start off this smart. We were broken into once, too.

We also use Simplysafe and it has been a huge help to protect our properties - we've also been broken into and have had copper pipes in our houses stolen before. However, we still get a bunch of false alarm calls so I was looking for a way to add video capabilities to the system but most require wifi, which we don't have in our flips. How do you deal with that and the Night Owl?

I'm curious how some of you structure your businesses. We're looking to create an entity structure that will support owning 100+ rentals and doing 30+ flips/yr with a handful of staff members.

Right now we're thinking of having: 1) An LLC that owns a series of Single Member LLCs that each own a couple properties - either rentals or flips, not to be mixed. This is be more of a real estate holding company. 2) A separate LLC to perform property management duties for the rentals, as well as manage deal [flip] sourcing and construction/project management. This would be the entity that has all staff on payroll The question is whether entity #1 or entity #2 should be paying for the rehab construction. My inclination would be to say that #2 should be writing the checks to the contractors and invoicing entity #1 for the work performed, however, I don't want to make things too complicated. Any thoughts on this?

I am looking to start a networking group for real estate investors on Long Island who have done 10+ flips in the past year or who own 20+ rental units. What will make this group different from other networking groups is that it will be exclusive to investors who are doing a substantial number of transactions so that we can have discussions around best practices, lessons learned, etc. when scaling a business to this level and beyond.

I'd like to see if anyone here meets these criteria and would be interested in networking with other full-time investors.

@J Scott that's an interesting approach and would allow you to compare actuals vs budget since that's done on the P&L. I'll have to see what my accountant thinks about that.

@Dan V. that makes sense having the same broken out accounts in WIP and COGS so that you don't lose that data.

@Will Barnard I may end up experimenting with Items which would provide some additional granularity without having to add a ton of different accounts.

Is anyone using projects? It seems like if I end up going down the route of using a construction management tool like CoConstruct or BuilderTrend, they are built around Projects and Items - which makes sense for their core market of home builders/remodelers, but I'm not sure whether it will work well for fix & flips.