All Forum Posts by: William Allen

Will you earn more than 6.5% on the money if you invest it into another property?  A $20k pay down on the loan won't create more cash flow right now but will increase the principal pay down (I'm assuming this is a home loan...)  This will increase your taxes slightly due to more income on the property even though it isn't realized yet.  These are all things you probably already know but they would be just a couple of the reasons why I would use the money to acquire another cash flowing property instead of paying down my mortgages or company debt.  However, there are other factors in play here so if you are happy with your portfolio then start paying off properties.  

@Ryan Patton 

Welcome to BP and I look forward to meeting you at one of the REIA meetings in Pensacola. I am another buy and hold investor in the area, will be interested in reading some of your posts. What area do you invest in currently?

@Mardochee Pierre  I can tell you who I had on my team in the beginning, me!  The other people involved in the Flip who I relied on were my contractor or subcontractors and my real estate agent who I had been working with for a while looking for properties.  The rest of my "team" consisted of everyone who answered all my questions on here and the authors of the books I read.  Don't try to get too big too fast, add those costs to your profit.    Good luck!

@Steve Scherrer

I think this is a great idea and I was even discussing something similar with my uncle this past weekend. He has two daughters going to the same school now and they rent out a 3 bedroom with another friend. I was asking him about the process of finding housing for the girls and he said it was very competitive and the houses filled up very fast, well before the next semester started. As a REI I saw a great opportunity there and will certainly be doing something similar to what you are talking about when our kids go to school. I like your idea of using the 529 draw for payment of rent, I would certainly dig into the tax codes to see about that or speak to someone more knowledgeable on the 529 program. I have one setup for our son and room and board is certainly included in the program. Good luck and update the thread when you make a decision, I am interested to hear what you find out.

@Antonio Coleman Things are going well and I am glad that I did it myself.  I learned a lot throughout the process and that knowledge will certainly help me in the future going forward.  I used a lot of the techniques you outline in your blog so I appreciate that greatly. With the site up now, I have been working on building business profiles all over the web to help drive traffic to my site and move me up in the rankings.  I am also coming up with a laundry list of blog posts to write about in the future.  Thanks for checking in!

-Bill

@Mike Kelley

I am in the same boat as you right now, starting to ramp up a marketing campaign and trying to get leads. We are moving to another city this month and want to have the same success there that we had in our current location.  I worked the online stuff first and will slowly implement the direct marketing and networking once we get settled in. I looked at your site and you nailed it, it's a people business and relationships are key. You are on the right path and it wish you lots of luck in the the future!

@Scott Le

 I was going to mention that I use Angie's List as well, more to find people to contact as I find most people leave reviews when they are pissed off or really happy and not when they just have a good experience.  Referrals that I have gotten from other investors haven't panned out very well for me either, they either don't call me back or call me back weeks later.  I was in a similar situation this winter with my bathroom reno, I just ended up doing it myself because no one wanted to get paid around the holidays.  One other idea could be to go straight to a GC just for the roof,  you will end up paying his cut but you may get a better quote overall or one similar since he may get a better rate than you. 

One good thing about using your own money is that the holding costs go down and allow for an easier timeline.  But, it sounds like you are still pushing to get it done quickly which is important. 

Just need to make sure you have proof of funds to send to them when the contract is initiated. The easy part about using your own money is you can come up with POF quickly, it will get slightly more complicated with a HML but I'm sure it can be done. Hopefully a HML or someone with more experience in that world can give you some advice.

@Scott Le

First let me say congratulations on your first closing. 

As for the roof and the contractors, that is certainly going to happen but I wouldn't have expected it to be that bad.   Do you have any other contractor contacts in the area that you trust and know do good work?  If so, I recommend contacting them for a roofer referral.  You may have already done this and if so, I'm at a bit of a loss other than asking some Tampa folks on here who they use. 

One thing that I found is that if you find the one guy who does great work at a great price, hit him up for other people he works with.  I have an HVAC guy here who has sent me 3 different referrals this week, electrician, septic, and handyman.  These contacts have saved me a ton of money and would have been very hard to find on my own.  They are licensed guys who do great work but they aren't good at marketing and getting their names out there.  Just good old local boys who get business via referrals. 

Good luck and I wish you the best of luck.  Keep us updated.

@Tim Jones

Homesearch uses another company for loans, I think it is called greenlight.  I have no experience with them but I did buy a house through homesearch using cash.  There have been some questions on the loan side of that site on here, but I don't recall any good answers to the questions.  Worth a look using the search function though.

I also recall only some of the properties on homesesarch being available to finance, most were cash only.  It should say it on the auction description.  Good luck!

-Bill