All Forum Posts by: Rob Brautigam

Nice addition here, these should be pretty useful once they get going.

Mailchimp and Aweber are great if you run a business website with an email opt-in form as well. They run in the $10 to $20 per month range.

Hi Lakila,

1) Practice in your market. The only real way to judge a good deal is to run the numbers on a bunch of properties in your target area. After you run calcs on 5 to 10 properties you will be able to pick out the potential "good deals" just from the location, no. of units, list price, current rents, and several other variables that will come to you intuitively with a little experience.

2) If you plan on 'house-hacking' and living in one of the units, I would definitely recommend taking care of maintenance yourself. You will quickly learn to do all the little things (changing light bulbs, tightening handles, putting up blinds). If you don't want to get into the more involved tasks, you can hire out the work to a contractor (carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc).

I would not recommend paying for a property manger (~10% of gross income) while you're living in the property yourself.

3) I'm in the process of purchasing a 3-unit with 5% down using a FHA loan. This loan requires you to live in the property for 1 year, but are free to do as you want after that 1 year period. It's a great way to put down a minimal amount of cash up front, while keeping some savings for your next deal.

@Nick CoonisNice! I'm very familiar with AutoCAD...once you're a pro, there's very few tasks you can't accomplish. It's a great tool in all industries for getting your thoughts on a page, quickly and professionally.

You say you're on the hunt for a new project...If you ever find yourself with some downtime in real estate and drawing up your own plans, I know there are plenty of people out there searching for highly skilled freelancers in all aspects of CAD. Try upwork.com for starters, you can make some nice side cash too, if interested in going down that road.

Hey Michael, I'm curious why you have subtracted out principal in your last calc, artificially increasing ROI? I get it that it's the principle payment increasing your equity in the property but where would you account for this in the straight up cash purchase in your first example? How is it income if it's just "changing pockets" from your savings account to equity in the deal?

A lot of people hit on it already, but I really believe the advantage of REI over HML is the aspect of leverage. Put 25% down, deduct interest, gain through appreciation, You also have the ability to defer taxes on capital gains with a 1031 exchange. Although 13% is an nice return, you'd be missing out on a lot of tax benefits that real estate provides.

 Thank you for your insight. 

Nick, that's an awesome achievement. As a young engineer, this is something I would like to accomplish one day. How long did the whole process take from start to finish? (Design, structural check, alter design, final approval, etc.) I'm really interested in your set of plans as well, would you mind emailing them to me as well?

Whether you take the class online or in classroom, you will review the same material from the same book. In general I would prefer an in-classroom course (teacher-student interaction, able to ask questions, etc), but if you can't commit on a weekly basis, the online class may be best for you.

If Colorado allows online classroom hours, you may want to take advantage of that...Connecticut requires 60 classroom hours (Principals & Practices) in order to sit for the test.

Thanks for the information @Cameron Norfleet, good to know. I am about to inherit 2 leases in a purchase, I wonder what the best move to make in this situation would be, or just include the notice in the new leases when they expire.