All Forum Posts by: Eric Pope

I've done business with Peggy Broach at Carolina Farm Credit in Statesville. She's a pro. Depending on your needs she may be able to help you. Tell her I recommended her to you. Good luck!

Fellow BP Investors,

Like many of you, I enjoy learning more about our business and one of the ways I do this is by reading the latest real estate books. With that said, I want to offer a warning on a book that was recently released on Audible called Buy, Rehab, Rent Houses, Refinance, Repeat by Brandon Phillips.

If anyone has seen this book listed or has considered reading it, let me warn you that it is not a legitimate real estate book! It appears to be someone’s scam attempt at profiting off the work of others by taking advantage of the interests of true investors and other readers and offering a resource that is not credible to any degree.

Here are some word-for-word examples that come straight out of the book:

“You thus need to save some few coins before you think of starting out real estate.”

“Having a good credit standing means that you are generally abiding by the terms of the agreement of your credit card. In other words, it is the credit standards of premises. Thus, for you to operate in the real estate business, it may require some loans to fund your premises. However, if you have a bad credit standing, you may not be able to access loans for many organization.”

“The first step is buying the place. Buying a building or a place has the factors in which people have to follow when they are interested in somewhere. One should look at factors which will make an investment a max profit face.”

“A perfect depiction can be on instances when tilling of floors is done sloppily and it leads to plumbing problems such as water leakages. This leads to cropping up of moles that have a detrimental effect on paints.”

These are not typos. This book is full of numerous grammatical errors and broken sentence structure.

Despite the high rating on Audible (100 out of 102 five-star ratings as of this post), they do not appear to be legitimate reviews and many are easily recognized as plagiarized from reviews posted elsewhere. In fact, I even found reviews that were copied from the BiggerPockets book Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat: The BRRRR Rental Property Investment Strategy Made Simple by David Greene. I’m learning that there is a growing problem with certain scam books coming out on the market that aren’t legitimate, and the scammer even has dozens of fake reviews posted under fake names to pump up the book’s ratings.

There is no credible information or sound real estate investing advice in this book even in general, yet alone the BRRRR strategy. It is clear the author is not an authority on anything related to real estate investing or the BRRRR strategy. My warning to anyone that is just starting out in this business or wanting to learn more about BRRRR - please do not consider this a legitimate real estate investing resource! It needs to be removed from Audible and reported. If you want to truly learn more about the BRRRR strategy, there are plenty of other credible resources out there.

Happy Investing!

Thanks for the valuable input.  And I would encourage anyone else that comes across this later to jump in as well.  I've continued trying to find local community lenders, first checking with my own personal lenders of course and referrals from local connections, and working my way around our area.  The feedback I'm getting from most of these lenders is that they either don't currently do HELOCs on investment property, or they're not willing to be in 2nd position behind our primary mortgage lenders on those properties.  PenFed may end up being our solution.

Hello BP community. Does anyone know where we can get a HELOC on rental houses that still have mortgages on them? I would like to pull some equity out of a couple of rental houses in the form of a line of credit. Of the local lenders I have contacted, most have said they do not offer lines of credit on investment properties. One lender said they would, but only if the properties were in their local area (which they're not). Another lender will offer lines of credit on investment properties but not in second position behind a mortgage.

Some have asked why we don't just consider a cash-out refinance on those properties.  Two reasons.  First, we want access to the cash, but we don't have an immediate need for it yet so we're not interested in significantly increasing a mortgage payments and reducing our cashflow just to pull out some equity.  Second, I don't want to lose our financing terms, as both of those particular properties are financed long-term at 3.25%.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Hello BP community. Does anyone know where we can get a HELOC on rental houses that still have mortgages on them? I would like to pull some equity out of a couple of rental houses in the form of a line of credit. Of the local lenders I have contacted, most have said they do not offer lines of credit on investment properties. One lender said they would, but only if the properties were in their local area (which they're not). Another lender will offer lines of credit on investment properties but not in second position behind a mortgage.

Some have asked why we don't just consider a cash-out refinance on those properties.  Two reasons.  First, we want access to the cash, but we don't have an immediate need for it yet so we're not interested in significantly increasing a mortgage payments and reducing our cashflow just to pull out some equity.  Second, I don't want to lose our financing terms, as both of those particular properties are financed long-term at 3.25%.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!