All Forum Posts by: Brenden Mitchum

This is awesome @Aaron Harren! Thank you so much for sharing. Very inspirational! 

I especially love how every one of your deals you made the deal. You used some form of creative financing for each one and each one had numerous complications and hurdles that you had to solve to make them work. 

Congratulations on the awesome couple of years getting started! I hope that I am able to have at least half your success!

Hey @Joel Parrilla!

Here is an awesome guide to estimating arv by J. Scott. This really helped me and is the model I use every time I estimate arv. You can find the comps on zillow by searching for homes sold in the past 6 months with similar features as your subject property.

Hope this helps! Please, feel free to message me anytime if you have other questions or just wanna chat!

Hey @Cedric Skeen!

Having recently gone through the pre-approval process, I believe I can answer your question. However, you should definitely speak with the lenders to verify.

First, let's clarify something - pre-qualification and pre-approval are often used interchangeably. However, they are two separate things. Pre-qualification is the first, most basic step. This simply gives you a ballpark idea of what you may be able to afford. You should be able to do this quickly over the phone with the lender and will not require any credit checks. Pre-approval is essentially the process that the lender goes through to confirm the information you have given them and also involves a hard credit check. 

This means that the answer to your question is no, getting pre-qualified will not hurt your credit and you can get it done by as many lenders as you'd like. However, if you are referring to pre-approval then yes there is a hard check involved so this will hurt your credit. Number of recent hard checks is part of what determines your credit score. That being said, you have a 30-day period from the time of the first hard check to do as many as you'd like. As long as they are all within the 30 days from the first hard check, you will only be dinged for one on your credit.

Again, this is what I was told while being pre-approved so you will want to double check this information. Please feel free to message me anytime if you have questions or just want to chat!

Hey @Nick Taylor.

Now I am certainly no CPA so am definitely not qualified to give advice. That being said, as far as I know you can only invest a dollar in one thing at a time. This means that if you have your money in a particular stock, you cannot simultaneously invest this in another stock. So no, you cannot leverage the stock itself, unless you are that company (stocks are literally how companies leverage other people's money). That being said, you can absolutely sell those stocks and invest that money into real estate. This is a strategy many people choose to get started in REI.

Hope that helped! Please feel free to message me anytime if you have questions or just want to chat!

Hi @Jessica Hollis, welcome to the BP community!

So let me start by posing a question: How were those flips that you assisted financed?

While having a ton of capital certainly helps one get started, there are people getting started every day in real estate with little to none of their own money. A great place to start is @Brandon Turner's Book on Investing in Real Estate With No and Low Money Down. The key here is to leverage opm (other people's money). This could be a friend or family member, the seller, hard money, etc. 

When you say you want to do this full-time are you referring to flipping or a different strategy?

Please, feel free to message me anytime if you have questions or just want to chat.

Hey @Brian Fleming, welcome to the BP community!

First off, I just want to make sure you are fully aware of the risks of land contracts. You do not own the home until you have fully paid for the asking price. The seller holds the title until you do so. This means they can boot you out with little to no reason. If you miss one payment, you are likely out of there and the seller will hold onto whatever you have already paid them. So how much do you really trust the seller here?

Now let's assume everything went great and you paid on time and the seller never kicked you out, what if the market does drop in a year? You will still have to pay the prior agreed upon price. So it will just be up to you if the deal is worth it. But this goes for any deal right now, especially if you are getting into any deal that will require a refi. If the deal hinges on a refi at a certain value, just know the risks there and account for them. 

I am not understanding your last questions. Why do you need pre-approval if you are doing a land contract? You should be asking your lender what they will refi the property for and you should definitely explain the situation as I am not fully aware of how lenders look at refinancing land contracts.

Hope that helped a little bit! Please feel free to message me anytime if you have other questions or just want to chat!

Hey @Beata Williams, welcome to the BP community!

I, too, am in the process of choosing a broker to hang my license with. I have thought about going with a larger company for the greater legitimacy. However, I do also feel that some of the larger companies do have a stigma associated with them that could actually prevent a seller from deciding to list with you. So what could look very reputable to one seller may turn another off. This is the dilemma I have been tossing around in my head.

But in reading the Millionaire Real Estate Agent by Gary Keller I am realizing that what really matters is you and how you represent yourself to a potential customer. It's all about creating and maintaining those relationships and it truly is quantity of quality. You should be getting to people long before they are even making the decision to sell. If they have already made the decision to sell and decide to go with a large agency rather than a small one, the chances you are going to get that lead is close to zero anyways. So if your lead generation is off the charts, it won't matter if a few people don't want to go with you because of their opinion of your company. 

Now that I am no longer worrying about the size of the company my decision is really just coming down to fees and resources. I am going to go with whoever can provide me the most and best resources for my money. Another thing to think about is how much mentorship you will get with a large vs. small company. 

Please feel free to message me anytime if you have questions or just want to chat. Good luck on your journey in real estate sales!

@Thomas Laskey

Nice man! A quad house hack, in my mind, is the ultimate way to house hack, especially if you can rent out some rooms in your own unit too. 

The search has been slow. Atlanta is red hot and there are not a ton of small multifamily so they go real quick and for inflated prices when they do pop up. I will likely just go the SF route with a mother-in-law suite or something.

Taking a short break to get my real estate license though so hoping to pick back up on the search in a few weeks.

Have you begun looking yet? Any idea what area you want to be in?

@Ryan Bissell

With $345/mo cash flow, why wouldn't you just refinance? That's a perfectly good amount of cash flow for a SF as long as you have factored in all expenses and vacancy.

If you are hesitant to jump into something large, you could do one of three things. Go small with that 4-plex, partner up with someone and go bigger, or pay for a mentor to walk you through the process. This will just be up to you and your risk profile. But don't be afraid of going big. Every day people are doing their first ever deal as an apartment complex. 

The bottom line here is that you have tons of options and it sounds like you already know the worst one is to refinance and purchase another primary residence so that's a great start and better than most!

Hey @Ryan Bissell, welcome to the BP community!

The issue here is that you lived in this property for 19 years already. This means that there is just no way it can really be analyzed as an investment property since it is not an investment. Primary residences are simply not investments (unless house hacking) despite what society leads us to believe. Ignore the ROI on it because that really does not matter at this point since you've already dumped the cash into it.

So rather than looking at it as a rental investment, look to how you can use it to make a real investment. Now are you looking to move out simply to make it an "investment property" or are you moving out for another reason? If the former is the reason, why not stay in your home, refinance or heloc and use all that equity you've been building to buy a real investment property? If the reason you are moving out is something else, will the property cash flow if you refinance or heloc? Perhaps you would be better off selling the home and using a 1031 exchange to purchase an investment property? With over $200k of profit you could purchase a pretty major investment property like an apartment. Now you have gone from having this liability on your hands to a cash flowing investment property. 

I hope this helps and makes sense. If you have any questions or just want to chat, please feel free to message me anytime!