All Forum Posts by: Dan DiFilippo

Good points being made here. One thing I would add, and it may or may not be something you've considered, is the VA loan. Perhaps you've already used it once back in your home state or NJ (or maybe your home state is NJ) and that's why you're starting this query from the point of a downpayment. That's certainly legitimate. Though you may not know that you can usually use your VA loan more than once.

Whatever it is, you should talk to an agent.  @Don-Carlos Moniz is great and I'm happy to answer any questions as well.

@Carl Mathis you're insufferable.

@Mitchell Lash there's something I did back when I was a PM. It was permissible by my jurisdiction, but yours may vary, so read up.

Tell them you'll be holding the lease and the deposit as you market for another tenant. If you can't get one, the lease commences as signed and you can charge rent and take the deposit. If you do get one, then you'll agree to cancel and sign the new one. If you want, you can see about helping yourself to a break-lease fee. Even if it is not agreed upon in the lease, you may be able to charge one in whatever amount you both find agreeable. A break-lease clause with a fee would typically only apply in a unilateral termination. This would be different.

@Ryan Blackstone bruh....

@Nancy P. Throw the whole book at him.

@Chris Tarpey appreciate the compliment.

@Joshua Biggins investor specialist on the Five Pillars Team here. Would be thrilled to chat. PM if you're interested.

@Taylor L. Not terribly impressed by his videos and his grasp on economics and the financial system appears pretty tenuous. Probably a fantastic real estate businessman, but I'm not putting much stock in his forecasts.

@Don-Carlos Moniz this sounds great, man! I'd be thrilled to talk more! My team, Five Pillars Realty Group with eXp Realty, is investor-oriented probably to the point of being the foremost investor specialists in the market. So we're always interested in networking with agents with this shared interest. We're having our Pints & Properties meetup next Saturday at TapHouse on Hay Street. Feel free to PM me if you'd want to discuss some more.

@Keisha D Dobney-Boykin municipal solvency

A lot of cities, especially lately, are looking at their cash flows and realizing that they can't both pay for their operations *and* fund their pension obligations.

So what has to happen? They either go through retrenchment (reduce spending - hurts the local infrastructure/economy), they increase local taxes (hurts the local economy), or they restructure pensions (hurts their credit and the local economy).

@Michael Metzger long term should perform better as people crash down through housing tiers. Essentially, new people show up to rent the same housing stock.

I don't mean to critical and I don't mean to get super into forecasting (even though that's a lie - I do), but what is "hedging on good appreciation in LA"?  Like an appreciation play?  I think that's old-paradigm thinking.  The last five years have definitely featured some explosive moves up in those real estate markets that were already high value.  Even though those markets have been slowly bleeding down their own value down to the lower value ones.  I don't necessarily see why appreciation is any sort of guarantee in LA or NY.  And I would argue that there's a tremendous solvency risk.  Which is to say, yes, you might buy for $500,000 in SoCal and hope for the I suppose somewhat decent chance (let's say 25%) that it will be worth $550,000+ three years from now.  So that's a 10%+ return.  But a 25% chance that the fake market that we know we're in experiences a rapid repricing.  In that case, you could find yourself down at $400,000 three years from now.  This would seem to be a much greater likelihood in higher value markets rather than lower.  So while the LA outcome distribution probably features higher tail risk (either tail), somewhere like NC probably has a smaller chance of outsized moves in either direction, but it does have significantly strong market fundamentals (intrinsic and macroeconomic), so I think NC offers much more stable and sustained appreciation.  And the fact that NC investments throw off cash is just a bonus.