All Forum Posts by: Bill Zhou

@James Hamling, really appreciate the detailed sharing of your experience! I agree, I definitely have a lot of house keeping to do as a first step. I haven't ventured into the commercial side but what you've explained regarding the confusion and lack of information makes sense. I am now taking steps to find someone to help me with asset protection. I just reached out to a credit union today to see about financing.

Yes you're right Tony, the key is to acquire higher yielding assets that I can buy and hold. I recently talked to a friend who specializes in BRRR and he's looking for limited partners to form JVs for various projects. They tend to have 8% cap rate with additional refinance after 3 years. I'm also trying to explore this avenue.

@John Woodrich, thank you for the feedback. I really agree with you that I should start with asset protection first. Are there any real estate attorneys or asset protection specialists in the Twin Cities that you would recommend?

Hey guys, my situation is a little tricky so I was wondering if I could get some input from you all. This is kind of a “what would you do” question. Thanks for reading!

Current situation:

I have five townhomes in the Minnesota suburbs that are fully paid off. They each have a market value of about $250k with a cap rate of about 5%. Currently these homes are all handled by a local management company over the past 10+ years and they've done a great job with lower than 5% vacancy rate. The rent from these properties are paying for my parents retirement. Some of these are in my name, one in my father's name, and one in wife's name. I report the earnings of all these properties as my personal income. I created a solo LLC last summer with the intention of asset protection and reducing taxes but I have no clue what I'm doing. I actually have a call with WealthAbility next week to see if they can help.

For the past 10 years I’ve lived in Singapore and the management company in Minnesota has done well for me so I trust them. I’ve only purchased property when I was in town with the help of a couple of trustworthy realtors. Now I will be moving to Switzerland for the foreseeable future and will need to be remote again.

My goal:

I would like to increase the cap rate to 10% to help fund my parents’ retirement since they are my dependents. I was thinking one course of action is to sell off these townhomes and buy quadplex properties through a 1031 exchange.

I’m not sure if this is the best course of action and I’m sure there are other options. I’ve no clue how to do this and never attempted.

Given my situation of living abroad and a $1.2M+ portfolio in Minnesota, what would you do? What would you do with the LLC structure and taxes?

Any comments and thoughts are welcome!

Hi everyone! I've been listening to BP podcasts for a while and really love the content. Was surprised to see such a large and vibrant community! I became an accidental investor 10 years ago when my job relocated me to Asia and I ended up renting out my townhome. Over the 10 years, I ended up having a total of 3 properties all managed under the same company. I liked the result but now I'm learning that there's a lot of things I could have done better with taxes, LLC, etc. Hope to learn more from you pros out there!