All Forum Posts by: Brent Shields

I have never been able to get a low down payment with a bank on a commercial property.

The times I have made it work it has always been an older person who owns the property and I ask them how they feel about paying taxes, if they have a huge negative reaction and really really hate paying taxes,

then I tell them they don't have to pay taxes now on anything they carry back.

Of course I ask them what they are going to do with the money and if they say nothing, they don't have any use for it.

Then I start explaining the tax benefits of them not pulling cash out of the sale. 

Every once in a while it works out great.

I think it's important to look at a lot of deals, 

learning how your current opportunity compares to all the other opportunities out there will make picking the right one for you a lot easier.

If your goal is to be a rental investor then it sounds like your on your way. Just decide where you want to end up with the number of houses or amount of rents you collect, and start working toward that goal.

The equity in the house you have gives you options, you can look at getting a loan on your current property and using that money to buy your next rental.

If your moving to a new area and new at being a landlord, I would suggest buying your rentals one at a time. Then you can learn from your mistakes starting out and they will cost you less.

I bought a condo in a war zone one time, the reason was that I only had to pay $15,000 and I had someone who would rent it for $1000 a month.

So in 15 months I would collect in rents what I paid for it. 

Of course I have all the typical nightmare stories and it took a lot of time and trouble. I had to fight for every dollar, but I ended up making money so I was ok with that. 

My suggestion would be to buy something small and see how much you like fighting for your money, if it doesn't bother you then start moving up.

One of my pet peeves are those agents who call the for sale by owners and tell them they have a super hot buyer who wants to buy their house right now. Then you meet them at the property so their buyer can look at the property before they purchase it. 

So you spent your time driving over to your house that's for sale, just to find out that the agent lied to you and there is no buyer they just wanted to get you to sign a listing agreement. The first couple times I actually believed them and thought they really had a buyer. 

More on the technology side, I would like some type of app that would let me easily keep track of people I contact and other information, like phone numbers and websites if they were talking about them, and I would like it to work on my phone and on my desktop computer. 

So I don't have to copy and paste stuff to an email and email myself as a reminder.

I have had a bunch of HELOC loans, I think they are great.

There is only one thing that matters with a HELOC loan and that is - if the bank will give it to you or not?

I would also ask if they will do them on rental properties, and if so how many. 

Some banks will do one, some will do four or five.

I was using them to do flips, so the interest and fees were almost meaningless to me,

but if your going to hold rentals then your not making as much so you would want to check on what the loans cost and make sure that works for you.

If you own rental properties and you have them rented or you have proof your really trying to rent them, then all the expenses for those rental properties would be deductions. I don't see how commissions could make your deductions more legit?

If you are thinking about spending $30k to fix the floor, or discount the price $40k and selling the property.

I would absolutely sell it.

My experience has been that if they are not fixing the floor, then they are probably not going to fix much of anything else in the future.

So this will just be an ongoing problem as long as you own the property. 

I would cut my losses and move on to something better.

My experience has been that my worst flips made a lot more money than my best buy and holds.

So I would sell everything I had and put all my money into doing flips until I had all the money I needed to buy the rentals that would get me the passive income I wanted. 

I was thinking that same thing. 

Y2K made me realize if everyone is talking about a crash, then it's not going to happen.