All Forum Posts by: Cory Adams

This is indeed in the Austin area (about 50 miles away).

@Sharon Tzib I will confirm the taxes.

Getting blood from a rock might be easier around here :)

Thanks for the input guys. Kirk that's a nice dolphin in your avatar pic and thank you for the analysis.

2 year old duplex 199,000, currently rented at 1950 total.

Taxes 3650

Insurance 1300

Renters pay utilities.

Financing 70%

Thank you.

It is indeed my wife's company and we are co-owners.

So hiring pops looks like a no-go.

I have a question relating to rehabbing properties purchased with an SD 401k vehicle. My father in law is a GC and has a license. Could the SD 401k hire him to do work on a property owned by the SD 401k with being considered prohibited?

Second question is can you do minor work on a property held by your SD401k? I realize that all items for the rehab work clearly need to come from the SD401k and that I would not be paid for any time and expenses for such an endeavor.

Chris please read my other posts. You would gather that I did not maintain that those use cases needed big data. Very much the opposite in fact.

Duncan thanks for throwing the idea out there for us to chew on. I did want to ask you how a CRM app. helped you during your due diligence phase of purchasing an apartment? Did you use it to contact tenants to track things like deposits and rent schedules and see if that matched up with what the seller was providing? That is interesting. I can see how CRM would help you track tenant details after purchase.

Bill, I think you missed Duncan's point earlier in the thread. It isn't about predicting when the water heater is going to fail at 4916 S. Sunset. If you had 500 properties you might want to know: how many properties have a water heater older than 8 years, a roof older than 20 years and hvac older than 10 years. From there you might schedule inspections and do some repairs in a proactive manner vs waiting for something to fail perhaps costing you much more then you would have liked.

Last point I think anything that could give an investor a leg up is worth considering. Heck I might consider sacrificing a chicken if I thought such an activity might help me turn up a deal in the Austin area... On second thought there probably are not enough chickens in the world for that particular endeavor.

certainly *could... Small tablet keyboards are fun.

Why not? He certainly code offer what he does for to a wider audience I would think. It would have little to do with using Big Data concepts from what I gather from the thread.

Hi Duncan I believe that the focus of what your are looking for would be facilitated by a relational model. You already know what the data points are that you are interested in { age of hvac, age of roof, roof material, age of building, etc.}. The challenge for you is taking unstructured data in the form of receipts, inspections and such and formatting that data for import into a relational model for reporting. If you had 15,000 properties you could do this with a relational db and or excel. The time expended to prepare the data from receipts, accounting records or other would be the same whether the data was to be used in a relational model or a big data model because I imagine that much of this data is not in digital form already.

Big Data would come into play if you had a massive volume of data that you might want to analyze from various sources that would be too large for a relational model and or the rate of change/growth for such data was very high such that a relational model could not keep up (not going to mention Data Warehousing as that is not going to be cost effective for you). The data would have some structure such that Map Reduce jobs could be performed on them in order to aggregate data along sets that you are further interested in analyzing and or using the data from map reduce jobs to then import into a relational model or excel for further analysis. This is not hard and it is cheap. Installing Hadoop clusters on cloud instances within Amazon AWS is not that hard and or expensive. You could do the same on cheap commodity hardware as well. If creating Map Reduce jobs in a language is not your partner's thing then he/she could get started with Hive (sql like for creating Map Reduce).

Big Data would be interesting if you had massive data sets say from state wide tax records or a data feed from a city's inspection reports or a massive data set of historical data from a regional MLS... You can bet your last dollar large REITS, banks and hedge funds are doing this. The trick is getting a hold of the data. If you can do that, sign me up for the data analysis.

Fun fact: Big Data really began with J. Dean's white paper, written in 2004. For those interested the white paper is here http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/mapreduce-osdi04.pdf

Keep brainstorming on this. Your generalized approach could work but sourcing the data would be the challenging aspect of this. Here is an example of Big Data usage: If you wanted to judge renter sentiment you might follow several twitter feeds that had to do with life in a particular area. The data feed could be pulled using Twitter's api and dumped on a Hadoop cluster and map reduce jobs could run looking for key words. These key words would be aggregated on a daily basis in order to try to gauge sentiment. "I love Dallas", "Dallas sucks, can't wait to get out here", "My landlord Duncan is the man!"